Simone Biles and Suni Lee compete for the final time at the 2024 Paris Games on Monday.
Biles will be in the balance beam and floor finals, where she has won two bronze medals (on beam) and a gold (on floor) in previous Olympics. She has won three gold medals in Paris, bringing her career total to seven. Though Biles has not confirmed if she will compete in the 2028 Los Angeles Games, she said “never say never” Saturday.
Lee will also compete in the beam final, where she finished in fifth place in Tokyo. Lee has won two bronze medals and one gold in Paris, matching her medal total three years ago.
After winning gold in the men’s 100m final, Noah Lyles returns to the track for Round 1 of the men’s 200m. Since 2022, Lyles hasn’t lost a race in the 200m at the world championships or Olympics. If Lyles wins the 200m, he’ll become just the third man to win the 100m and 200m at a single Olympics — Usain Bolt (three times) and Carl Lewis in 1984 are the only others to do so, according to ESPN Stats & Information.
On the sand or indoors, a handful of America’s volleyball teams compete in knockout round play. Chase Budinger and Miles Evans face Norway’s Christian Sørum and Anders Mol, who won gold in Tokyo, in the round of 16. The U.S. men’s volleyball team plays Brazil in the quarterfinals after undefeated pool play.
Here’s what to look out for Monday.
6:23 a.m. ET — Inside how OMEGA determines winners in photo finishes
Two hours after the men’s 100-meter final, Alain Zobrist, Omega’s head timekeeper of the Olympics, is at a party at the Omega House in Paris’s Hotel de Poulpry to celebrate the Olympics coming to Los Angeles in 2028. It’s a star-studded affair, but Zobrist spent the past hour in a room upstairs speaking with news outlets on the phone and via Zoom to explain how he oversaw a room of judges at Stade de France as they determined who, in fact, was the fastest man in the world Sunday.
“Wait here. Let me get something,” Zobrist said after re-joining the party. He returns with an 8 ½ x 11 image from OMEGA’s photofinish camera that represents the finish line over a specific period in the final milliseconds of the race. At first glance, it looks like a photograph of the eight sprinters crossing the finish line. It’s a screen shot of the technology the judges used to determine the winner, which has split the runners to show when each man’s chest crossed the finish line. According to Olympic rules, the first runner whose torso reaches the closest edge of the finish line is the winner.
Whose toe or knee or head crosses first is irrelevant. The chest is what matters.
“Something said I need to lean, and I was like, ‘I’m going to lean,’ because it was that kind of race,” gold medalist Noah Lyles said after the race.
In the image, red vertical lines are drawn through the “frontest part of each man’s chest,” according to Zobrist. In real time, it was impossible to determine a winner, but in the image, Lyles’s chest clearly is out front. “It’s clear. He crossed the line first,” Zobrist says. “That’s the technology.
“Time doesn’t matter,” he says. What matters is finish order, and once the judges determine who won, they look at when precisely that happened. Then they compare how that time — 9.784 seconds — compares to records that have come before it.
The AI program then breaks down the data even further. A readout distributed by Omega shows Lyles’s reaction time of 0.178 seconds was comparatively slow to his competitors, but that he reached his top speed of 43.60 KPH (or approximately 27.09 MPH) at the 65.1-meter mark. It explains that the race’s critical moment came at the end. Lyles maintained his speed for the final 34.8 meters, while silver medalist Kishane Thompson decelerated, allowing Lyles to take the lead just after the 9-second mark. Most importantly, the document ends with a report of Lyles’s medal color: gold. — Alyssa Roenigk
