Noah Lyles’ — and Our — Olympic Moment

The quadrennial Summer Olympics turns even the least of sports fans among us into active, if not rabid, rooters of the athletes who captivate our hearts and imaginations, both in sports with which we are familiar (basketball, soccer, gymnastics) and those that we get to see only once-every-four-years (pole vaulting).

The Olympics are the ultimate shared experience for people of all ages. The shots of the jubilant young gymnasts who gathered in their home gyms to root on Simone Biles and the U.S. team reminded us of our youth, when we sat in our living rooms with our parents and siblings to watch seemingly every minute of Olympics coverage (in those days, the Olympics took on greater meaning thanks in large part to the atmosphere of the Cold War-era when the competition between the U.S. and the Soviet bloc was a proxy for world politics at the time), and then doing the same with our own children decades later.

Those memories of past Olympics cascade in our mind’s eye, with one memory leading to a host of others:

— The 1968 Mexico Olympics, when Tommy Smith and John Carlos raised their fists in the Black Power salute on the medals podium, and when the long jump of Bob Beamon, which was almost two feet further than the then-world record, led Beamon to completely break down in sobbing when his result finally was posted (it took almost half-an-hour because his jump so far exceeded the measuring equipment at the time that the judges finally had to resort to using a tape measure);

— The tragedy of the 1972 Munich Olympics when Palestinian terrorists kidnapped and murdered Israeli athletes, which overshadowed Russian Olga Korbut’s historic gymnastics beam performance and swimmer Mark Spitz’s seven gold medals (and his iconic photo);

— Bruce Jenner’s decathlon gold in 1976 in Montreal, which also featured Romania’s Nadia Comaneci’s first-ever perfect 10 in gymnastics;

— Carl Lewis’s track feats in the 1980s;

— Michael Johnson’s amazing feat of winning gold in the 200 and 400 in the Atlanta Olympics in 1996 (which also included a tragic bombing that killed one person and injured more than 100);

— Michael Phelps winning eight golds in 2008;

— The incomparable Usain Bolt winning the 100 and 200 dashes in 2012 and 2016 that turned all of us into Jamaican track fans;

— And of course, the Winter Olympics of 1980, when Winthrop’s Mike Eruzione captained the U.S. hockey team to a gold medal at Lake Placid over a heavily-favored Soviet team — all of us can remember where we were that Friday afternoon when Mike scored the winning goal, and then two days later when the Americans beat the Finns to win the gold medal (we missed that game because we were playing in the Chelsea YMHA’s Wild Animal basketball league on Sunday mornings).

So it was with a lifetime’s worth of Olympic memories that we tuned in to watch the men’s 100 meter finals on Sunday afternoon in which America’s Noah Lyles was competing in the first of what he hoped would be a Bolt-like 100-200 double.

As we all know, that 100 meter race will forever be etched in Olympic history. Lyles was dead last through the first 40 meters. The NBC commentator (the Australian guy who otherwise does a great job) called it right away for Jamaica’s Kishane Thompson — “Jamaica’s going to do it! Kishane Thompson is a gold medalist!!” –a mistake worthy of the historic “Dewey Beats Truman” newspaper headline. 

In the announcer’s defense, even Lyles himself thought that Thompson had won. But then the waiting game began — and for 29 seconds the entire world waited for the official announcement (vs. the 29 minutes it took to measure Bob Beamon’s jump). When Lyles was declared the winner by five one thousandths of a second (that’s .005), the joy and emotion, epitomized by Lyles’s mom almost collapsing in the stands, but then rallying to give her son a big bear hug when he fell into her arms — was shared by all of us.

Even diehard sports fans such as ourselves learned something new from that race. We always had assumed that the first part of the body to cross the line is what counted. But unlike horse racing (for which the phrase “wins by a nose” is accurate), a human race is determined by the torso, which effectively means the clavicle (commonly called the collarbone) because the runners are leaning forward as they hit the line.

So even though other parts of Thompson’s body had crossed the finish line ahead of Lyles’s, Noah’s clavicle had reached the line ahead of Thompson, and thus he was awarded the gold medal. It was an Olympic moment for the ages — and one that we and the hundreds of millions of people watching worldwide will never forget.

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