Hang it in the Louvre: Paris Olympics painted with agonizingly beautiful photo finishes

Noah Lyles leaned over to Kishane Thompson at the end of the men’s 100-metre at the Paris Olympics. 

“I think you got the Olympics, dog,” the vivacious American told the Jamaican as seven athletes stood frozen, with “PHOTO” flashing down the Stade de France video screen.

It may have been a mere 20 seconds of confusion, but it felt like an eternity.

Lyles erupted in celebration when his name flashed atop the list. He’d backed up all his talk, flare, and dramatics with a gold medal as the world’s fastest man — by five-thousandths of a second.

“Everybody in the field came out knowing they could win this race. I didn’t do this against a slow field. I did this against the best of the best, on the biggest stage, with the biggest pressure,” the American champion said, with seven athletes all within 0.09 seconds of Lyles’ 9.784 time.

WATCH | Noah Lyles takes men’s 100m gold in photo finish:

Paris Games taking close wins to new level

Headlined by the 100m, photo finishes are in vogue at the Paris Games. Hang the photos in the Louvre, as multiple have been worthy.

In the men’s 10,000m, Canada’s Moh Ahmed finished 0.33 seconds short of bronze, while Berihu Aregawi of Ethiopia finished two hundredths ahead of American Grant Fisher to win the silver medal.

Through the streets of Paris in the women’s road cycling race, the silver, bronze, and fourth-place finishes saw three athletes clock times of 4:00:21. Dutch cyclist Marianne Voss and Belgium’s Lotte Kopecky rounded out the podium, and Hungary’s Blanka Vas was left in fourth after 158 kilometres of cycling came down to the thousandth of a second.

The same thing happened in the mixed relay triathlon on Monday, with 0.005 seconds splitting Germany’s gold medal, Great Britain’s bronze, and America’s silver after a successful challenge.

“I’ve never been in a sprint finish before, so with maybe 400 metres to go, I’m like, ‘How do I do this?'” Taylor Knibb said after completing Team USA’s race.

While photo finishes aren’t new and date back to the Los Angeles 1932 Olympics, when Eddie Tolan won the first Olympic photo finish ahead of Ralph Metcalfe in the 100m at 10.38 seconds, the consistency of which things are coming down to the wire in distance events is irregular — if not exceptional.

The men’s 100m was the closest 1-2 finish since at least the boycotted 1980 Moscow Games, but that was before the Olympics introduced electronic timing down to thousandths of a second for speed skating in 1992 at the Winter Games in Albertville, France.

Not so ‘Games Wide Open’

It all comes down to Omega, the official timing partner of the Olympics and many of the top events around the world, which uses a photo finish camera called the “Omega Scan’O’Vision” to capture images and times down to the thousandths of a second — measured accurately to the extreme, much more so than Metcalfe’s 1932 review.

With a chance at Olympic glory once every four years, getting the right result is critical to the integrity of the Games, and that’s where the emotional component of sports enters the equation.

As ABC’s Wide World of Sports once put it, it’s the thrill of victory and the agony of defeat.

At Paris 2024, that’s the case. Even with the mantra “Games Wide Open,” there’s little to no space in the final moments, with fractions of seconds making victories and defeats hit that much harder.

“I worked really, really hard this year; all I was looking forward to was a championship … I just didn’t have anything left in the last 50 [metres],” Ahmed said after his fourth place 10,000m heartbreak.

“Honestly I have no regrets. I think I ran that really, really f—ing well.”

WATCH | Moh Ahmed comes up short in men’s 10,000m:

Moh Ahmed has ‘no regrets’ after 4th place finish in the 10,000m race

Moh Ahmed of Saint Catharines, Ont., spoke with CBC Sports after placing fourth in the Olympic men’s 10,000-metre race in Paris.