Entering Paris Games, the top U.S. male Olympian isn’t a swimmer
Updated January 4, 2024 at 5:25 p.m. EST|Published January 4, 2024 at 5:51 a.m. EST
“The only thing that changes from last year to this year,” Lyles said, “is a world record.”
As another Olympic year dawns with the Paris Games seven months on the horizon, Lyles ends his epic 2023 as the undisputed best sprinter in the world and enters the first post-covid Olympics as perhaps the United States’ biggest male Olympic star. Earlier this month, World Athletics, the governing body of track and field, named Lyles its men’s track athlete of the year. He pops up weekly on commercials during NBC’s “Sunday Night Football,” the most-watched television show in America. With his 27th birthday arriving a week before the Opening Ceremonies in Paris, Lyles is only now entering his athletic peak.
He could become the first American to be crowned World’s Fastest Man at the Olympics in 20 years. He could challenge Usain Bolt’s 200-meter world record of 19.19 seconds — 0.12 seconds faster than Lyles’s American record. He could elevate his sport in his country’s consciousness in the way he has always envisioned and not just for a “really weird” two-day news cycle that had a universe of people that included Kevin Durant, Drake and Stephen A. Smith questioning his rationality.
“I’m the guy,” Lyles said early in December from Monaco, where he accepted his athlete of the year award. “That’s what I’ve been pushing for. Nobody wants to be not the guy. Nobody wants to be the other. They want to be Him.”
Lyles, who attended T.C. Williams (now Alexandria City) High in Alexandria, Va., understands the final ascent to superstardom will hinge on his performance at his second Olympics. In Tokyo in 2021, Lyles won bronze in the 200 meters, which remains one of only two 200-meter finals he has not won as a professional. He entered those Games after a turbulent year in which he openly shared his mental health struggles. Since Tokyo, Lyles set the 200-meter American record at the 2022 world championships and won three golds — 100, 200 and 4×100 relay — at worlds this past summer in Budapest. For him to transcend track and field, he knows, it will take another huge showing on an Olympic stage.
Lyles uses his Tokyo experience “totally as motivation,” said Lyles’s mother, Keisha Caine Bishop, who also serves as his manager. “I heard him say — and it’s so true — a world championship is an amazing accomplishment, but the outside world, the people who don’t follow track year-to-year, all they want to know is: Did you win the Olympics?”
In Tokyo, Lyles ran in front of a mostly empty stadium, without family and friends, isolated in his hotel room when he wasn’t competing. He is an extrovert who views races as performances as much as competitions, and the lack of a crowd sapped his energy. Lyles may own an Olympic medal, but he effectively views Paris as his first Games.
“I don’t think it’s that weird to say that,” Lyles said. “I’ve talked to a lot of other athletes who Tokyo was their first Olympics. We’ve all agreed that Tokyo was not an Olympics. There was no fans. There was no environment. There was no fun activities. We’ve all agreed that it was just not it. Because of that, everyone is so passionate about making Paris the best Olympics ever made. There’s a lot of energy moving toward that direction.”
Lyles became the first man since Bolt in 2015 to claim the 100-200 double at a world championships, and he has only increased his ambitions for Paris. He teased the idea of trying for a quadruple gold by adding the 4×400 relay, the final race of the Olympics and an event he experimented with last spring at a low-profile meet. (His team won.) He thinks he can lower his personal best of 9.80 seconds in the 100. Owing primarily to Bolt’s dominance, the United States has not produced a male Olympic 100-meter champion since Justin Gatlin in 2004, its longest drought ever.
“I haven’t felt like I’ve mastered the 100,” Lyles said. “Which is crazy to say because now I’m the world champion.”
Lyles and his mother always shared an inside joke to describe his events: The 200 was his wife, and the 100 was his “side chick.” He attempted to make the 2021 U.S. Olympic team in the 100 but finished seventh at the trials. He skipped the event altogether for the 2022 world championships. But he never ceded his aspirations at the distance, understanding the power of the sport’s marquee event.
“The 100 meters, you get to say you’re the fastest man or woman alive,” Caine Bishop said. “It comes with so much more street cred.”
At the start of last year, Lyles focused on the 100 as he never had. In the 200, he had always relied on his top-end speed and footwork around the curve to make up for his relatively mediocre starts. He and his coach, Lance Brauman, honed his technique out of the blocks, creating angles that maximized his acceleration. He upped his weight training and added three pounds of muscle, a significant gain for a sprinter. He worked with his sports psychologist to embrace thinking of himself as a 100-meter runner.
Early in the year, Lyles entered 60-meter races, which emphasize the start even more than the 100. He won four and in one beat Trayvon Bromell, who has one of the best starts in American sprinting. By summer, Lyles had vaulted to the top of the world in the 100.
“I’ve always known personally I have the fastest top-end speed in the sport right now,” Lyles said. “A lot of people would always be like: ‘No you don’t. You’re not the 100 champion, so how can you say that?’ I’ve known it for years. Now that I have that title, they can’t say anything.”
In Lyles’s personal hierarchy, the 100 has a new place.
“It’s not the side chick,” Caine Bishop said. “The 100 is now the sugar mama.”
Still, the 200 meters remains Lyles’s best event. He aimed for Bolt’s world record in Budapest but fell well short at 19.52 seconds, shy of even his own best time of 2023. He had never attempted the double at a major championship before, and he believes the experience taught him what his body needs to make it through three rounds and still surpass Bolt’s 19.19.
Even knowing how much to sleep and when he can grab an extra hour of naptime will make a difference. The demands of the double wore down Lyles in Budapest so much that when he arrived at the track late in the afternoon before the 200-meter final, he took a two-hour nap in the waiting area.
“I feel that I didn’t push myself to try and obtain a world record so much because I wanted to win the 100 more than I wanted a world record,” Lyles said. “Records can be broken, but a gold medal is immortal. Now I feel after going through Budapest and how well my body handled everything, okay, I can do both. I don’t feel there’s a reason to sacrifice one or the other now.”
Lyles’s confidence has grown during the early portion of his new training season. If he improves five skills in a year, he typically retains two at most for the next season. So far, he has built on only what he added last season and increased the weight he’s lifting, especially in squats and dead lifts.
“I’ve of course trained my body to do things no one else has,” Lyles said. “But I’ve never felt like I’ve slowed down that process.”
After he received his award in Monaco, Lyles approached World Athletics President Sebastian Coe. They shared a “fascinating conversation,” Coe said, about how to grow track and field in America, a topic never far from Lyles’s mind.
“He’s got some really clear views about the sport,” Coe said. “And actually, I share a lot of those views with him.”
Lyles wants to bridge the gap between, as Caine Bishop called it, “track famous and regular famous.” He started the practice of “fashion walk-ins” before meets, arriving at the track in Gucci with a camera filming. He starred in a docuseries on Peacock. He will be a featured character on a Netflix reality series set for release later this year about the world’s top sprinters, made in the vein of “Drive to Survive” and “Full Swing,” which helped raise the profile of Formula One and professional golf.
Lyles entered mainstream sporting discourse in a way he didn’t plan. After his final gold in Budapest, Lyles questioned the practice of American professional sports league title winners, specifically the NBA, proclaiming themselves world champions. “World champion of what?” Lyles quipped. “The United States?”
Lyles went out to a club that night to celebrate. When he awoke in the morning, his phone glowed with messages from friends.
“They’re just like: ‘Bro, you need to respond back. KD is getting in on this,’ ” Lyles said. “I’m like: ‘What are you talking about? What words are you saying? What are you saying? Because you can’t be talking about the basketball player.’ They’re like, ‘No, bro, go to Twitter.’ ”
Durant, who called himself a fan of Lyles, had written on Instagram under a clip of Lyles’s sound bite, “Somebody help this brother.” Draymond Green chimed in. Drake, the rapper, poked fun of NBA players piling on.
“Okay,” Lyles remembers thinking, “this is getting a little bigger than I thought.”
With input from his agent, Lyles decided against responding. Stephen A. Smith apologized for calling him “flagrantly ignorant” on First Take. Giannis Antetokounmpo went on a podcast and agreed with him. After the United States failed to medal in the FIBA World Cup, many U.S. NBA players committed to the Olympics.
“What’s funny is now all these basketball players are saying they’re going to be on the Olympic team, which I assume they were going to say,” Lyles said. “A lot of people were like: ‘No, they did this because of Noah. He called them out, and now they all want to be on the Olympic team!’ I don’t think it had anything to do with me. If I get a mention in the next Dream Team documentary, I think that would be pretty funny.”
In Paris, Lyles would like to meet some of the NBA players he provoked. But the schedule will not allow it. He will be training during the first week and competing during the second, trying to win his first Olympic golds and maybe break a world record. He already can imagine a packed stadium, so different from Tokyo.
“I saw the stadium is purple,” Lyles said. “And my favorite color is purple. So I think this stadium was made for me.”
