Four-time Olympic Games medallist Ato Boldon says the men’s 100m final at the Paris Olympic Games could come down to Jamaica’s Kishane Thompson and American World Athletics Championships gold medallist Noah Lyles.

Boldon, an analyst for American broadcasters
NBC, says the Jamaican champion, who is the world leader with a personal best 9.77 seconds, could have the edge going into the Games and says a second American, Kenny Bednarek, should complete the men’s 100m podium.

The men’s 100m is set to start on the second day of the track and field schedule, Saturday, August 2 and will end the next day, but Boldon has all but written off the chances of the contenders from Africa as well as Jamaica’s Oblique Seville as far as medalling is concerned.

“My podium is Lyles, Thompson, and Bednarek,” Boldon said on the LetsRun.com Track Talk podcast posted on Friday. He defended the record of Bednarek, who was second in the 100m at the US Trials at Hayward Field, Oregon behind Lyles. Bednarek also won silver medals in the 200m at the Tokyo Olympic Games in 2021 and at the World Athletics Championships in Oregon in 2022.

“You know what Kenny does,” Boldon asked. “Kenny wins medals, and in fact, you take away last year, Kenny wins medals every year, so I’m not one of those who will discard him.”

Boldon, who won medals for Trinidad and Tobago in both the 100m and 200m at back-to-back Olympic Games, in Atlanta in 1996 and Sydney in 2000 and coached Jamaica’s Briana Williams to the World Under-20 sprint double in Finland in 2018, said Thompson was his pre-Games favourite.

“The favourite is Thompson,” he said at the start of the section, “and I know Noah is the world champion. I think Noah made it a little bit more interesting by running that 9.81 seconds into a headwind, which kind of almost converts to 9.77 seconds but there’s no way you can look at the way in which Thompson ran that 9.77 seconds and just go, oh, no Noah will beat him.”

Thompson ran his personal best and world leading 9.77 seconds, the joint ninth best all times, at the Jamaican Championships in late June while Lyles ran his personal best 9.81 seconds while winning at the London Diamond League meet two weeks later.

“Noah is going to have his hands full with that guy and I think the most interesting thing about this is that I think he and Noah have a very similar race patterns,” he said and compared Thompson to former world record holder Asafa Powell.

“I look at this guy Thompson and I go, this is Asafa Powell, and Asafa Powell would have been a problem for anyone.”

Boldon argued that Thompson, who has raced 10 times in his professional career, might be overlooked by most pundits.

“Now, having said that, there are things which I see people completely ignore — Kishane Thompson has not been under the microscope of Olympic favourite, that’s the first thing; two, we all know rounds are a great equaliser. Noah has medals that he does because of how well he runs rounds, so is Noah suddenly a lock for the silver medal, no, but he does have his hands full with Thompson. I feel like if I had to bet now, it would be a toss-up because those two are pretty evenly matched.”

There was no love for Seville who beat Lyles at the Racers Grand Prix at the National Stadium on June 1 however.

“I’m not trusting Oblique Seville any more because I picked him to medal twice at the last two worlds and he was fourth, so I’m not trusting him,” Boldon said. “Tebogo has had a tough year, losing his mother. I don’t trust any of the African guys, [Kenya’s Ferdinand] Omanyala or [South Africa’s Akani] Simbine as they just do not show up in finals in a way that that’s meaningful and [Great Britain’s Zharnel] Hughes has not been the same, so yeah, that’s my podium.”