Noah Lyles vs Kishane Thompson rekindles Jamaica-US rivalry.
Sixteen years ago, as the Olympic year of 2008 began, the United States appeared prepared to win the men’s 100-meter gold medal in Beijing. Tyson Gay, the world’s top sprinter, won the 100, 200, and 4×100 triple in the World Championships the previous year. He was destined to be one of the stars of the 2008 Olympics.
Then in May, a young Jamaican who had never run the 100 meters at a global championship began ripping off fast times. Gay enjoyed a strong 2008 season, even setting a personal best in the leadup to the Olympics, but it was not to be his year. Gay developed a hamstring injury before the Olympics and was not close to 100% in Beijing. It would not have mattered, though. The young Jamaican seized the Olympic stage for his own and would not give it back. Usain Bolt had arrived.
Four Olympic cycles later, could history repeat itself?
In 2024, the US once again has a bona fide sprint star coming off the 100/200/4×100 triple at Worlds in Noah Lyles. And the similarities between Lyles and Gay go much deeper than that. Like Gay in 2008, Lyles went on to win this year’s Olympic Trials. Like Gay, he has run a 100m personal best in the leadup to the Games. They even have the same coach (Lance Brauman), agent (Mark Wetmore), and sponsor (adidas).
And, just as in 2008, there is a Jamaican phenom who could be poised to steal the show at the Olympics. Kishane Thompson, 23, is not Bolt — no one is — but he has enjoyed a similarly meteoric rise in the 100 meters. Two years ago, Thompson had a personal best of 10.21 and had never raced outside of Jamaica. Now he is the world leader at 9.77 — quicker than Lyles has ever run — with the potential to go even faster in Paris.
The US used to own men’s 100 at the Olympics, winning 16 of the first 25 gold medals on offer. But since Justin Gatlin‘s gold in 2004, the Americans have been shut out, with Bolt winning in 2008, 2012, and 2016, and American-born Italian Marcell Jacobs taking the win three years ago in Tokyo. Can Lyles end the drought? Will Thompson earn Jamaica’s first gold since Bolt? Or will someone entirely different emerge, as Jacobs did in 2021?
Let’s dig into the race before a champion is crowned on August 4.
Lyles entered the Olympics in the form of his life.
Lyles ran a personal best of 9.83 to win the world title in Budapest last year and since then, the 27-year-old has only gotten faster. Lyles’ best attribute as a sprinter is his top-end speed and his ability to hold it at the end of races. That is why he is essentially unbeatable in the 200 meters — an event he has not lost since 2021 and one in which he has won the last three world titles.
But as a sprinter, you cannot have it all. Athletes with the best top-end speed are rarely the best starters as well. Lyles has spent his entire career working on his start, and while he is rarely first out of the blocks even now, he has improved his start to a level few expected he would ever reach. This year, Lyles ran a personal best of 6.43 in the 60 meters indoors and beat Christian Coleman — the 60m world record holder and one of the greatest starters in history — to win the US title. Coleman got his revenge by winning the world indoor title, but Lyles’ silver medal at that meet was further proof of the progress he has made.
Outdoors, Lyles was beaten on June 3 in Kingston, running 9.85 to the 9.82 by 2023 Worlds 4th placer Oblique Seville of Jamaica. But Lyles rebounded from that defeat at the US Olympic Trials, tying his pb to win the 100 and repeating as Trials champ in the 200. In his final meet before the Olympics, he ran a personal best of 9.81 seconds in London on July 20.
He has done all this while heaping pressure upon himself. Lyles wasn’t just one of the stars of SPRINT, the Netflix documentary series that dropped earlier this month; he also worked with NBC to produce a separate doc about his 2023 season (and that was before he knew he was going to win triple gold). At the Olympic Trials, he raced with Yu-Gi-Oh! cards tucked into his singlet and planned elaborate stadium walk-ins accompanied by Snoop Dogg and a silver briefcase.
Lyles knows he is painting an even bigger target on his back, and his tendency to speak his mind meant he came across as a quasi-villain in SPRINT. To his critics, all those pre-race antics feel forced, not authentic. But Lyles also has plenty of fans. He knows his time at the top of the sport is limited, and while he’s here, he is going to do things his way.
“Usually I don’t feel pressure because I’m just having fun,” Lyles said after winning the Olympic Trials. “All I gotta do is be me. I constantly tell kids all the time, ‘Be yourself,’ and if people see me as being corny, shoot, I’m corny. Guess what? I’m winning while being corny.”
Thompson joins the scene.
If you’ve been paying attention to Jamaican sprinting the last couple of years, maybe you suspected Kishane Thompson was capable of what he has been doing in 2024. But if you’re a casual track fan, Thompson has been easy to miss. He has never run at a Worlds or Olympics, and for the first six months of this year, he was largely invisible.
Thompson’s coach, Stephen Francis of the famed MVP Track Club in Kingston, says that is because Thompson has not been able to stay healthy.
“He has had a continuous shin problem over the last three years where he could not [train],” Francis told Television Jamaica in June. “If he starts to train, he does one rep of whatever, two reps, and he’s done. He can’t do anymore.”
That was why Francis imposed a rule last year that Thompson would not run more than one round at any competition. Even when Thompson ran the fastest time in the preliminaries of the 2023 Jamaican championships — 9.91, a massive improvement on his personal best of 10.18 — Thompson did not compete in the semis, giving up his shot to qualify for Worlds. He improved to 9.85 later in the season in Xiamen, then finished 4th at the Diamond League final in 9.87, just .04 off the win.
But the shin issues persisted and Thompson added injury to injury by tearing his quad in January. As he rehabbed the quad, however, Francis said they were finally able to find a solution for Thompson’s shin woes. Francis has been vague in Jamaican media interviews about the exact nature of this “solution” but he said it has enabled Thompson to complete his full training program for the first time.
“We saw something made by an Australian company,” Francis told Television Jamaica. “And that company didn’t ship to the US or anywhere else so we had to find a way to get to Australia to get this thing. And it worked. So he has been free of pain in his shin.”
That does not mean injuries are no longer a concern. Thompson only raced once prior to the Jamaican trials in late June, and he only managed 50 meters of sprinting in that one before pulling up lame.
But when Thompson has finished races this year, he has looked incredible. He ran a personal best of 9.82 in the first round of the Jamaican trials, then ran 9.84 in the semis and 9.77 in the final — the fastest time by anyone in more than two years. Then Thompson headed to Europe and crushed reigning Worlds silver medalist Letsile Tebogo by running 9.91 into a headwind in Hungary on July 9.
What’s scary is how Thompson has run these times. It’s almost as if, now that he is healthy, Thompson does not know what to do with all of that extra speed. He told the Jamaica Gleaner that when he tried to shut things down to conserve energy in the first two rounds at the Jamaican trials, he almost fell because he is not used to running rounds.
Before the trials final, Francis told Thompson to only race the first 60 meters and shut it down once he was assured of a top-three finish. Thompson raced more than just the first 60, but he also ran his 9.77 despite staring at the clock for the final 20 meters:
His 9.91 in Hungary looked preposterously easy, Thompson toying with a top field by looking left and right well before the finish line:
Thompson has frequently been compared to former world record holder Asafa Powell. In addition to having the same coach, both are tall and powerfully-built — seriously, Thompson is yoked. And Thompson’s pb of 9.77 is exactly the same as Powell’s was at the same age. But Thompson will be hoping the two men are different when it comes to championship performance: despite a long, prolific career, Powell never won an individual gold at a global championship.
Breaking down Lyles v. Thompson
USA vs Jamaica is the rivalry that is supposed to define the sprints. But over the last 15 years, that rivalry has usually been strongly tilted in one direction or the other. When Bolt was around, Bolt (and thus Jamaica) dominated, outside of his final year in 2017. And since then, the US has mostly owned the 100, winning the world title in 2019, 2022, and 2023 with zero Jamaican medals in that span. Now, finally, it looks as if both countries are strong at the same time.
Who you like between Thompson and Lyles says a lot about what you value. Thompson has the higher ceiling. He’s four years younger, he has a faster personal best, and his races this year suggest he may have more in the tank in Paris. But he’s also more injury-prone (Lyles never gets hurt) and has never faced anything close to the pressure of an Olympic Games. Meanwhile, Paris will be Lyles’ fifth global championship.
“Kishane Thompson has not been under the microscope of Olympic favorite,” NBC sprint analyst Ato Boldon said on this week’s LetsRun.com Track Talk Podcast. “That’s the first thing. Two, we all know rounds are the great equalizer. Noah has the medals that he does because of how well he runs rounds.”
Lyles is a safer bet to run well in the final. But sometimes it takes a great race to win gold, not just a good one. If Thompson goes 9.75 in Paris, can Lyles reach that level?
With the right wind, he just might. According to Jonas Mureika‘s sprint conversion calculator, which strips out the effect of wind and altitude, Lyles’ 9.81 at the London Diamond League is the most impressive performance of 2024.
Leave a Reply