The year that was: Omanyala continues to battle the best

While the high point of men’s sprinting over 100m and 200m in 2023 is probably best summed up in two words – Noah Lyles – there was a greater depth to it than ever before as 40 athletes ran 10 seconds or faster, improving on last year’s best of 35.

Although he ran out of gas at the Wanda Diamond League final in Eugene, where he failed to add to his total of five Diamond Trophies, the exuberant 26-year-old from Gainesville, Florida enjoyed his finest season so far as he won a first world 100m title and a third consecutive world 200m title before anchoring the United States to 4x100m gold.

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The hardest part of that triple triumph in Budapest’s newly-built National Stadium was the first one. 

While Lyles has been getting consistently faster over the shorter distance, he was far from being the favourite, having finished third at the US Trials after recovering from Covid.

The field included his US teammates Fred Kerley, the defending champion who had opened his season over 100m in Yokohama in May with a timing of 9.88, and a resurgent Christian Coleman, the 2019 world 100m champion, as well as the potent but injury-disrupted talent of Italy’s Olympic champion Marcell Jacobs.

But on a day of surprises, both Kerley and Jacobs failed to reach the final, with the former missing out by 0.01.

The first part of the double suddenly looked more do-able for Lyles, who had boldly predicted a time of 9.65. But Coleman remained a serious rival, and after making the kind of start one would expect of a sprinter who has run the 60m in 6.34 – 0.05 faster than any other – it seemed as if this small, powerful figure would regain the title he had won in Doha four years earlier.

But Coleman faded over the final 25 metres, finishing an agonised fifth in 9.92 after Lyles, as always, had made big gains over the final metres.

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Lyles’ first world 100m title was won in a personal best of 9.83 that equalled the world lead set a couple of months earlier by Zharnel Hughes in what was a British record

Hughes earned tangible reward in his breakthrough year with bronze, one place behind Botswana’s prodigious 20-year-old Letsile Tebogo – earning a first men’s 100m medal for Africa – and one ahead of Jamaica’s 22-year-old Oblique Seville, with all three timed at 9.88.

Tebogo, a double world U20 champion, earned silver by one thousandth of a second, clocking a national record of 9.873 to the Briton’s 9.874, with Seville, fourth for a second successive year, timed at 9.877.

In April, Tebogo had ensured that the Botswana Golden Grand Prix – the first World Athletics Continental Tour Gold meeting to be held in southern Africa – ended on a high for home fans in Gaborone as he won the 200m in 19.87, taking 0.09 off his personal best.

Coleman may not have finished strongly in Budapest but he did so in Eugene as he won the Wanda Diamond League title by equalling the world-leading mark of 9.83 set by Hughes and Lyles.

The latter was second in 9.85, with Kenya’s Ferdinand Omanyala third in the same time, just 0.01 shy of his season’s best.

China’s Xie Zhenye added his name to the list of sub-10 performers in 2023 by clocking 9.97 to win the Asian Games title on his home soil of Hangzhou.

By World Athletics