Team USA star sprinter Noah Lyles officially became the fastest man on the planet after clinching gold in the men's 100m final on Sunday, but he thought he'd been beaten to the line by Jamaica's Kishane Thompson.
Lyles emerged victorious in what was the closest men's 100m final in 44 years , clocking a time of 9.79 seconds. All eight finalists could barely be separated at the line, leading to an anxious wait as officials examined the photo finish.
Initially, it looked like Thompson had won, and both he and Lyles stood together as they stared at the screen and waited for the official race results. Lyles ended up winning by 0.005 seconds in one of the most memorable finishes in Olympics history, but he revealed after the race that he told Thompson the gold medal was his.
"To be honest, I didn’t know if I had it. I leaned but I didn’t know I had it," Lyles told Jamaican broadcaster SportsMax TV after celebrating winning his first gold medal. "Me and Kishane were at the end waiting for our names to come up and I came back and I said, ‘I’ll be honest, man, I think you got that one’.
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"But my name came up and I was like, ‘Oh my gosh, I’m amazing’." The margins were so fine that only 0.3 seconds separated first and fourth, and all eight runners were within 0.12 seconds of each other.
Lyles achieved his dream of becoming No. 1 and said in an interview with BBC Sport: "You couldn't have asked for a bigger moment. A guy in biomechanics comes down and before I came out here, he said it was going to be this much, that's how close it is going to be and gosh was he right.
"I had to take every round as it was and I was a little upset after the first round so I came with the aggression and after I ran that 83 I was done with the aggression. My sports therapist told me you need to let go, you're holding on. Let go and release it."
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Lyles may have won gold, but the Team USA sprinter is just getting started. He has completed one of his career goals after clinching first in the men's 100m final but has more objectives on the horizon.
"When you get to the top, you start to think about what do I have to do to be considered the greatest when I leave my sport?" Lyles said. "Grabbing a world record is one of two things I have left to do, the other being grabbing an Olympic gold.
"So it’s on the list. As I aim for being the greatest, it’s something that I want to get." Lyles has ambitions of surpassing Usain Bolt as the greatest sprinter in history but has a lot of work to do if he is to close in on the legacy left by the Olympic icon.
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