Some of these athletes were already well known before the Paris 2024 Olympic Games, and they arrived surrounded by high expectations. Others were perhaps less familiar. But all left their mark on Paris.
In athletics, on the elegant purple track of the Stade de France, 24-year-old Swede Armand Duplantis dominated the pole vault event to win his second consecutive Olympic title, a first in this discipline. In front of 65,000 delighted spectators, he beat his own world record of 6.25 meters by just one centimetre.
After her victory in Tokyo in 2021, 25-year-old American Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone once again took the 400m hurdles title and set a new world record of 50.37 seconds, up from 50.65 in July. Alongside her compatriot Gabby Thomas, 27, gold medallist in the 200m and 4 × 100m she also contributed to the US team’s gold medal in the 4 × 400m.
Another American star of the Paris Games, Noah Lyles, triple world champion (100m, 200m, 4 × 100m) and bronze medallist in the 200m at the Tokyo Games in 2021, was aiming for an unprecedented quadruple: 100m, 200m, 4 × 100m, and 4 × 400m. The flamboyant sprinter only managed to climb to the top of the 100m podium in 9.79 seconds, 0.005 seconds ahead of Jamaica’s Kishane Thompson, in a historic final in which all competitors ran the race in under 10…
