Marquee event can still make hearts race

Even short on star power, 100-metre final delivers

- ROSIE DIMANNO

Sprinter Noah Lyles, top, won the 100-metre final on Sunday, while Andre De Grasse didn’t make it out of the semifinals.

Did Paris bring the sexy back for the marquee event — ever and anon — of the Olympics?

Because the men’s 100-metre sprint has been suffering from a serious lack of glitz power since the retirement of legendary Usain Bolt.

Unlike other showcase features of the Games, the 100 is burnished in unique 24 karats and those who’ve laureled live on in eternal fame, their names never disappearing into the mist of history: Jesse Owens triumphing under the nose of Der Führer in Berlin; Britain’s Harold Abramson victorious the last time the Olympics passed through Paris acentury ago, a story so saturated in drama that it was memorialized in the Oscar-winning film “Chariots of Fire”; back-to-back coups for Carl Lewis.

Or, in the case of Canada’s Ben Johnson, infamy that never wears off.

Oh, there were acclaimed sprinters who crouched in the starter blocks at Stade de France for Sunday night’s final, as a hush fell over the sold-out crowd. But few of the runners would have been recognizable outside the sports arena — outside of track nerds or their home countries.

Noah Lyles, probably, not only for his achievements — six times a sprint world champion — with no shortage of chutzpah, if without the corresponding charisma, that aura of magnetism which came so naturally to Bolt. The Jamaican luminary would fist bump with officials at the start line, playing to adoring audiences with his Bolt bolt pose and kidding around with young challenger Andre De Grasse in Rio, the two of them pulling an Alphonse and Gaston act.