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Noah Lyles, the world’s fastest competing athlete, is aiming to become the first man since Usain Bolt to achieve an Olympic sprint double.
Thursday’s 200-metre final in Paris will be a fitting stage for the Olympian to show off his two best skills — sprinting and hyping himself up. After winning gold in Sunday’s 100 metres in the tightest of photo finishes, the highly confident Lyles has backed himself to finish first again.
“None of them is winning,” he said of his competitors. “When I come off the turn, they’re gonna be depressed.”
Lyles, 27, has long been a 200-metre specialist, winning gold in the Youth Olympics a decade ago. His personal best of 19.31 seconds, recorded in 2022 when he won his second of three golds in the World Athletics Championships, is the third-fastest time ever, and more than a tenth of a second faster than any of his Paris rivals.
Bolt, the retired Jamaican sprinter, set the 200-metre world record of 19.19 seconds in 2009 — and Lyles has been clear about his intention to break it. After making the US team in June, he said he had set himself two goals: “Grabbing an Olympic gold, and then . . . grabbing a world record. It’s on the list.”
Lyles has overcome adversity in his return to prominence on track and field’s biggest stages. He struggled with depression during the early months of the coronavirus pandemic and finished third in the 200 metres at the 2021 Tokyo Games.
He has since been on a mission to re-establish himself as the world’s best sprinter, while also leaning into his role of pot-stirrer in an effort to boost athletics’ media profile and the prize money on offer as a new crop of investors vies to reshape the sport.
A star of the recent Netflix documentary series Sprint, Lyles has taken aim at US stars in sports such as basketball who proclaim themselves “world champions” for winning domestic league titles.
“You know what hurts me the most is that I have to watch the NBA Finals and they have ‘world champion’ on their head. World champion of what? The United States?” he said after winning the sprint double at the 2023 World Championships. “I love the US, at times, but that is not the world.”
A win for Lyles in the 200-metre final would offer him a bigger platform to air his views. Rivals include his compatriot Erriyon Knighton, who has a personal best of 19.49 seconds, and Botswana’s Letsile Tebogo with 19.50.
In Lyles’s dramatic photo-finish victory in the 100-metre race, he edged out Jamaica’s Kishane Thompson by a mere five-thousandths of a second.
Jamaica, which has become a sprinting powerhouse in recent decades with the rise of Bolt and other athletes, has had a disappointing Games — winning only one athletics gold so far, in men’s discus. Shelly-Ann Fraser-Pryce and Shericka Jackson withdrew from the 100-metre and 200-metre women’s races respectively, the latter having already pulled out of the shorter-distance event before the Games began.
US sprinter Gabby Thomas won the women’s 200 metres on Tuesday. Reflecting Lyles’s motivational qualities, Thomas said she was partly inspired by her male counterpart’s performance in the 100 metres.
“Hearing Noah go after what he wanted and take it, I knew that if I were in any position in this race, I could still go after it and take [the gold],” she said.
Data visualisation by Samira Chowdhury and photo finish graphic by Ian Bott
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