With its first gold medal in the event since 2004, the confident Lyles ended a 20-year American drought

It’s probably time to stop the handwringing about the state of sprinting in the United States.

On Sunday, three U.S. sprinters reached the finals of the 100 meters. In one of the closest finals in Olympic history, the leader of the pack—Noah Lyles—pulled out a victory with nothing left to spare.

It took a near-perfect race and a dip at the end, but the 27-year-old Lyles edged out Jamaica’s Kishane Thompson with a personal best time of 9.784 seconds. Thompson also ran a 9.79, but Lyles finished 0.005 of a second faster. Lyles’s teammate, Fred Kerley, won the bronze.

The race was so close that Lyles, in real time, said he thought Thompson had won. “We were waiting for the names to pop up, and I’ll be honest, I came over and I was like, ‘I think you got the Olympics, dog,

Thompson, running in his first Olympics, remembered Lyles coming over after the race but had no idea of what had just happened.

When we both crossed the line, as he said, he came to me and said, ‘Hey man, I think you got it,’ ” Thompson recalled. “I was like, ‘Wow, I’m not even sure,’ because it was that close.”

Lyles was flying blind in the race. Thompson was in Lane 4 and Lyles, who was in Lane 7, couldn’t see how strong a race Thompson was running. Fortunately for Lyles, he listened to an inner voice that spoke just as he approached the tape. “Something said I need to lean, and I was like, ‘I’m going to lean,’ because it was that kind of race,” he said.

That turned out to be a gold-medal lean.

This was a great race, a dramatic victory and an invigorating moment for U.S. track and field. Ever since the 100 meters became the cornerstone of the Olympic competition, the United States has been a dominant force. Not including Sunday’s result, the United States has won 16 of the 29 men’s gold medals and nine of the 22 women’s gold medals in Olympic history. But there has been a significant drought.

What has hung over the heads of not just Lyles but the entire U.S. sprinting community is the idea that American sprinters, once a feared commodity on the international stage, had lost their swagger. No one feared U.S. sprinters as they had, even going back to yesteryear names like Charley Paddock, Eddie Tolan, Jesse Owens and Wilma Rudolph.

Because of “Bullet” Bob Hayes at the 1964 Tokyo Games, critics coined the phrase “World’s Fastest Human” and conferred the title on the winner of the 100 meters. Carl Lewis won back-to-back Olympic 100-meter titles in 1984 and 1988, and then Maurice Green—a relative unknown—showed what a deep bench of sprinters the United States had when he won the gold at the Sydney Games in 2000.

Who would have guessed that when Justin Gatlin won the 100 meters in 2004, his victory would be the United States’ last Olympic gold medal in the event until Sunday night when Lyles was pushed to run the race of a lifetime.