It was one of the most human moments of a very human Paris Olympics. Just past the finish line, exhausted from expending everything he had in the men’s 100-meter final, American sprinter Noah Lyles walked over to his Jamaican competitor, Kishane Thompson, both of them breathing so hard they could barely speak.
“I think you got the Olympics, dawg,” Lyles said to Thompson.
He meant it. The American had busted hard to the finish, but from his position in Lane 7, he felt that Thompson, in Lane 4, had gotten there just before him. And it was that close — it was down to what Lyles thought, not what he knew.
It was thousandths of a second!
But Lyles was wrong — joyfully, for him. After reviewing timing devices that are built to detect down to those thousandths and even more, and looking at photos from three high-speed cameras that film at 40,000 frames per second — in other words, looking far, far beyond what either the naked eye or multiple replay angles could ever possibly show — judges declared Lyles the winner of the gold medal by virtue of his torso lean at the end.
His official time: 9.784.
Thompson’s time: 9.789.
As Washington Post writer Dave Sheinin points out, those results are so incredibly close statistically that if the sport were swimming, which can’t employ a laser beam at the finish, the race would have been declared a tie. Lyles and Thompson would have been co-gold medalists.
Instead, Lyles went into a stunned celebration as his name was posted atop the finish board. Thompson took silver.
We could have watched the race a thousand times and not been able to discern that finish, which is part of what made it such an incredible moment. The 100 meters in particular is such a fire-drill of a race that razor-close finishes are actually routine, but even by the standards of a sub-10 second event, this was utterly impossible to determine without technology so advanced it can actually calculate times to the millionth.
But sure — let’s trash the broadcaster who got it wrong.
If you’re looking for a sign that some folks have too much time on their hands, check the social media reaction to NBC’s Leigh Diffey initially calling the race for Thompson. It’s a mind-boggling level of calculated, self-righteous buffoonery.
Diffey thought the same thing as Noah Lyles. He thought that Thompson had just nipped Lyles at the finish. “Now Thompson starts to wind up!” Diffey exclaimed near the end of the sprint. “(Fred) Kerley’s going with him. This is close. Jamaica’s going to do it! Kishane Thompson is a gold medalist!”
Again — Lyles thought so, too. But that didn’t stop people from pasting Diffey once the onionskin-thin finish had finally been sorted out. (That process, Sheinin noted, took nearly three times longer than the race itself.) And in the end, Diffey wound up apologizing, saying, “I shouldn’t have been so bold to call it, but I genuinely thought he (Thompson) won. I got it wrong. I am thrilled for @LylesNoah as his story only gets bigger!”
Too late — the long knives were out. Critics said Diffey could have fallen mute at the end of the 100 meters, or perhaps said something like, “Who has done it?” Instead, he tried to call the race. He didn’t have his thousandths-of-a-second device handy, evidently.
There’s a weird schadenfreude at work here. Most of us who watch sports want to hear a great call in a big moment, and there’s nothing wrong with that. But there was an extra energy poured into the pounding of Diffey. Even Dan Le Batard, who’s both reasonable and funny almost all the time, couldn’t help jumping in.
“That announcer will be haunted for the rest of eternity. No one had a worse moment in track and field than that guy,” Le Batard said at one point on his show. (Le Batard later took to Twitter/X to explain, “I didn’t crush Diffey. I feel terribly for him. And not as badly as he himself must feel.”)
Diffey did get it wrong. No way around that. As it turns out, we’re humans, so that happens sometimes. I wouldn’t spend too much time fixating on it.
Decades ago, one of NBC’s most venerated Olympic track announcers, the late Charlie Jones, literally misidentified the winner of the men’s 800 meters at the Seoul Olympics — and not in a photo finish, either. Both Jones and his broadcast partner, Frank Shorter, thought Kenyan Nixon Kiprotich had won, but they had the wrong man. In fact, it was Kiprotich’s teammate, Paul Ereng, who had overtaken the field on the final turn.
Jones apologized profusely on the air, adding, “We have blown this call. Gentlemen, we were wrong.” He said that he subsequently spent a sleepless night going over the race, trying to figure how he and Shorter missed the point in the scrum at which Ereng passed Kiptrotich.
“And then what?” L.A. Times writer Larry Stewart asked Jones?
“The sun comes up,” Jones replied, “and you go back to work.”
