Noah Lyles ran away with the gold medal in the men’s 100-meter final.
The 27-year-old world No. 1 sprinter finished with a time of 9.79, a personal best, to secure first place on Sunday, Aug. 4. at the Stade de France at the 2024 Paris Olympics.
Lyles’ time edged out Jamaican sprinter Kishane Thompson, who took home the silver medal, and his fellow Team USA runner Fred Kerley, who clocked in at third place.
The win marks Lyles’ first gold medal in the Olympics, and the first time Team USA has won gold in the event since the Athens Games in 2004. Lyles previously won bronze in the 200-meter final in Tokyo in 2021 — and to mark the occasion of his first gold, the athlete raised his racing bib in the air, showing off his last name for the world to see.
“To be honest, I just believed in myself,” Lyles tells reporters, including PEOPLE, of finishing the race strong after being in seventh place halfway through following a slower reaction time. “That goes to prove that reaction time does not win races.”
Lyles says he believed his competitor Thompson “had it at the end,” and went up to him as they awaited the scores to tell him, “Bro, I think you got that one, big dog.”
“And then my name popped up and I’m like, ‘Oh my gosh, I’m amazing,’” he says. “I’m gonna be honest, I wasn’t ready to see it. And that’s the first time I’ve ever said that in my head, like I wasn’t ready to see it. He was quite a few lanes down, so it was hard for me to picture where we were, but I guess that was a good thing.”
The athlete also notes how he was prepared for this year to be different than the Tokyo Olympics, telling reporters he knew “every step of the way it was not 2021.”
I’m still constantly moving forward, moving forward, moving forward, and I knew that when the time came, for me to be able to say, ‘This is the final, this is where I need to put it together,’ I was gonna do it,” he says.
The men’s 100-meter final occurred roughly two hours after the semifinals, where Lyles came in second place to Jamaica’s Oblique Seville and just ahead of Louie Hinchcliffe of Great Britain.
American Kenneth Bednarek also competed in the 100-meter final alongside Lyles and Kerley, 29, and came in seventh.