EUGENE, Ore. — Noah Lyles locked down the first major step in his quest for an Olympic sprint double Sunday, coming from behind to win the 100 meters at U.S. track trials in 9.83 seconds to qualify for that race in Paris.
Lyles overcame a slow start to beat 200-meter specialist Kenny Bednarek by .04. Fred Kerley, the 2022 world champion, finished in third and will also go to Paris. Christian Coleman, the 2019 world champ, was in the lead with about 30 meters left but finished fourth.
The Lyles win makes the American sprint favorites 2 for 2 after three days of these trials. It comes a day after Sha’Carri Richardson also lived up to expectations and won the women’s 100 to earn her trip to Paris.
This marks the first national title in the 100 for Lyles, who has long been a 200-meter specialist but who rededicated himself to the shorter distance last year.
He went on to win the world championship in the 100, 200 and 4×100 relay last year, setting the stage for a quest to do it again in the Olympic year. If he pulls it off in Paris, he would be in company with Usain Bolt, the Jamaican great who went 3 for 3 all three times he raced at the Olympics.
Ellis succeeds solo
Type some combination of the words “greatest” “track” and “comebacks” into the browser and, even to this day, a video from the 2018 NCAA championships will come up somewhere high on the first screen.
But that video of Kendall Ellis making up 30 meters over the homestretch to lead Southern California for a win is now only the second biggest highlight of her career. The biggest — the 400-meter national championship she won Sunday night at U.S. Olympic trials.
Known primarily as a relay specialist, Ellis shocked the field and will compete for her first individual Olympic medal next month in Paris. She won the race in a personal-best time of 49.46 seconds, beating the personal best she’d set the night before in the semifinals by .35.
Ellis, 28, is already the owner of Olympic gold and bronze relay medals and a few more from world championships. Given her resume, nobody would have viewed it as a shock for her to be named to this year’s U.S. relay pool. Now, that’s not an issue. The first-place finish makes her an obvious choice.
Ellis said her now-second-greatest win had roots from the year before when she ran an even faster split than she did on the rain-slickened track at Hayward Field in 2018 and got chased down at the end.
“A learning lesson,” she called it.
Among her medals are the gold from the Tokyo Games as part of the 4×400 women’s relay team, where she ran in the preliminary round. She also won bronze on the 4×400 mixed relay. Before that, she won a pair of gold medals from world championship relay t eams.
