Lyles and Hassan bookend a fabulous Paris programme

Agency :

The Olympic athletics programme, highlighted by the shortest event and then the longest, saw performances of astonishing quality and spine-tingling drama, played out to a beautiful and unique purple backdrop that will forever mean Paris.

The closest and highest-quality men’s 100m race and a late-night pole vault world record lit up the first week, while Sifan Hassan’s final-day marathon win to cap a barely believable hat-trick of medals was a fitting way to bring down the curtain.

“It’s been fantastic and I think the quality of athletics at the moment is almost beyond description,” Sebastian Coe, the head of World Athletics, said. “I can’t remember a time when we’ve had such a bandwidth of excellence.”
Nowhere was that more visible than in the men’s 100m, where Noah Lyles caught Kishane Thompson on the line to win by five thousandths of a second in 9.79sec. The six men behind them were also sub-10 – the first time that has happened in a legal race.

Lyles, the sport’s biggest showman, was unable to double up, taking bronze in the 200m and then revealing he was running with Covid. Botswana’s quiet assassin, Letsile Tebogo, became the first African to win it.

The US delivered a world record in the rarely run mixed 4x400m relay, but Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone’s obliteration of her own world record to win the 400m hurdles was of a different magnitude of quality.

Armand Duplantis also beat his own pole vault world record in a moment of great theatre at the Stade de France. With all other events finished and the Swede’s expected gold long pocketed, he failed twice at 6.25m before sailing clear to a stupendous roar.

Coe hoped the men’s 1,500m would be a “race for the ages” and it was – though not in the way he or anyone else expected. Briton Josh Kerr ran the race of his life to get past defending champion Jakob Ingebrigtsen, only for long-shot American Cole Hocker to come past them both and win in a huge personal best to produce one of the biggest upsets of the Games.

Ingebrigtsen bounced back to win the 5,000m, while in the women’s 1,500m Kenya’s peerless Faith Kipyegon completed an unprecedented hat-trick.