0.005 seconds: This is how Noah Lyles won the closest finish in Olympic 100m history

Once the closest, tensest men’s 100-meter final in modern Olympic history was over, the real drama was only beginning.

The race was so tight that the man who crossed the line first suspected that he’d finished second. Lyles put a hand on the shoulder of Jamaica’s Kishane Thompson to congratulate him. Thompson stared at the Stade de France scoreboard, willing the photo finish to go his way. “Come on, man!” he shouted.

Some 70,000 spectators held their breath. In the time it took to crown the winner, Lyles and Thompson could have run 100 meters three more times.

That was when one of the most advanced scoring systems in any sport on the planet got to work.

To determine that Lyles had won by a margin of five thousandths of a second, it took three judges, three high-speed cameras — and a willingness to make the fastest men alive stand around and wait.

During those agonising moments, the runners’ fates were in the hands of a team from Omega Timing, which has been responsible for tracking every fraction of a second at the Olympics for nearly a century.

This year, the company that operates with Swiss precision debuted something called Scan’O’Vision Ultimate, a new ultra-high-speed camera. And on Sunday night, as Lyles and Thompson crossed the finish line at almost exactly the same time, there were two of those cameras positioned to shoot down the finish line from outside the track, while a third sat inside the oval capturing the reverse shot.

Each one of those cameras had a single job: taking 40,000 images per second of a race that would come down to a photo finish.

The impossible closeness of the race — barely a tenth of a second separated first and last place — made it “a perfect showcase for our technology,” said Omega CEO Alain Zobrist.

After the runners crossed the line, three federation judges worked alongside an operator of each camera. A runner is deemed to have crossed the finish line when his torso breaks the vertical plane rising from it. The judges asked the operators to toggle forward and backward in time until they found the exact instant the winner crossed.

While the judges studied the smallest slivers of time, the athletes suffered a test of their patience more exhausting than sprinting 100 meters. In fact, the judges worked for three times as long as the race itself before determining that Lyles had crossed the line in 9.784 — or 0.005 second faster than Thompson.

“I wasn’t ready to see it,” Lyles admitted. “That’s the first time I’ve ever said that in my head.”

It is the athletes’ job to move as fast as humanly possible. The judges have the opposite job: to go as slowly as they need to, to get the result right.

“It’s not about speed,” Zobrist said. “It’s about publishing the right results. You double-check, triple-check before you press the enter button” — the button pressed by the lead judge that flashes the winner’s name on the scoreboard — “because there is no going back.”

Today’s sprinters should consider themselves lucky. There was a time when Lyles would’ve had to wait much longer to learn he’d become a gold medallist. In the 1940s, when the photo finish began, the cameras had actual film in them. After the runners broke the line, photographers had to walk next door to a darkroom to figure out what just happened.

“It could take up to two hours to know who actually won the race,” Zobrist said.

Elsewhere in today’s Olympics, judges turn to decidedly old-school techniques to define the margins between victory and defeat. At Roland Garros, tennis umpires don’t use the Hawk-Eye tracking system. Instead, the umpire scampers down to the court, walks over to the line and inspects the dusky red clay for the imprint of a tennis ball.

But eyeballing won’t suffice in races where 0.01 seconds can make all the difference.

In 2008, Omega’s technology revealed that Michael Phelps had beaten the second-place finisher in the 100-meter butterfly by exactly that margin.

And on Sunday, that same tech ruled on a race that even the sprinters themselves didn’t know who won. In fact, it was functionally impossible for any person, watching with their own eyes, to see who’d captured the title of world’s fastest man. The human eye takes about 0.1 seconds to blink. In that time, Omega’s cameras capture 4,000 images.

“It was hard for me to picture where we were,” Lyles said of the moment that made him an Olympic icon.

He didn’t have to.

– The Wall Street Journal