text CASSIDY GEORGE
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The American sprinter Noah Lyles was dancing at a club in Budapest in the summer of 2023, when he started receiving texts from friends, urging him to check his social media accounts. The Florida-born Olympian – the preeminent star of the world of track and field – had plenty to celebrate that night, after becoming the first athlete since Usain Bolt to win gold medals in the 100m, 200m and 4x100m races at the World Championships. His phone, however, wasn’t blowing up with heartfelt congratulations. Lyles was getting inundated with shady comments from NBA basketball players like Kevin Durant, and the league’s fierce defenders, like Drake.
“I thought it was funny!” says Lyles, when I ask what it felt like to experience an unexpected wave of wrath on a fun night out. The stir was caused by a comment he made in a press conference following his wins, about how ridiculous it is that North America’s National Basketball Association names its seasonal winners ‘world champions’. “It was just a bunch of whiny babies getting mad because I said they don’t compete on a world level. Everyone was in such a tizzy!” A snippet of Lyles discussing the subject went viral, spawning global headlines and inciting conversations on mainstream news and sports networks. “World champions of what? The United States?” he asked incredulously at the conference, in a tone and manner that made the moment feel predestined to become a meme. While the average person would likely be traumatised if they were roasted on Instagram by @champagnepapi (who joked that Lyles “ thought this speech was gonna be so hard in the mirror the night before… now the whole league doesn’t rate u”), Lyles, fortunately, is about the furthest thing from average imaginable. As of 2023, he holds the official title of the world’s fastest man.
What meaning could a single negative comment hold for someone whose life and legacy hinges on a fraction of a second – and whose decades of training and inclusion in history books boil down to the microscopic difference between 0.32 and 0.31? One of the most decisive moments of Lyles’ career to date was born from this numerical breach. At a match in Eugene, Oregon in the summer of 2022, Lyles watched his time on the counter for the 200m dash change from its original reading of 19.32 down to 19.31 seconds after a playback. In a hair-raising, cinematic scene, Lyles ripped his jersey open and off his chest, after realising he had just set a new American record – a feat that hadn’t been accomplished in the event for 26 years.
If you Google Lyles’ name, it’s immediately apparent that he is a man measured, first and foremost, by a dizzying series of digits. He is a six-time world champion, a 2020 Tokyo Olympic 200m bronze medallist, and a sprinter who has top speeds of up to 37km per hour. During our phone call, it soon becomes clear that precise numbers also dictate the flow of his daily life. We speak in a narrow window of time between a post-training snack and a cover shoot, as Lyles is driving across the city. Midway through, we pause for intermission: “Can I call you back in 20 minutes? They want to shoot B-roll as I pull up.” And, precisely 20 minutes later, he does. While the maelstrom in the background is distracting even for me, Lyles is completely engaged and present. “This level of chaos is pretty normal for me,” he says. But Lyles, who is both an athlete and an orator, has always been able to focus on the deeper truths that exist beyond the numbers.
The word ‘Olympian’ brings to mind certain stereotypical personality traits – stoic, disciplined, reserved, single-minded, even rigid. And though discipline plays a tremendous role in his life and character, Lyle’s personality is bubbly. He is a naturally gifted storyteller who punctuates his replies with laughs and smiles, and never hesitates to share a firmly held opinion or hot take. His aura is friendly and approachable, and something about the way he speaks – even to strangers – makes him feel like an old friend from school. Equal parts geek and cool kid, adult and young spectator, Lyles has never struggled to find ways to express himself, even within the strict confines of his sport. He has won races wearing fingernail polish, a glitzy, multicoloured chain-link necklace and Dragon Ball Z socks. Most of all, Lyles strikes me as someone who is comfortable in his own skin.
“I was able to learn very early on that life is a series of ups and downs, and that every scenario isn’t a hole, but a tunnel,” says Lyles. These lessons were instilled in him during his early childhood years, which were spent in and out of hospitals and on and off breathing machines. A struggle with severe asthma dominated his life from the ages of two to eight. As the son of two sprinters – his mother, Keisha Caine, competed in track and field at university, and his father, Kevin Lyles, won gold in the 400m relay at the World Championships in 1995 – Lyles knew he was athletic, but asthma prevented him from participating in sports competitively until high school.
In the absence of sports, other passions flourished. “I wanted to be a manga artist,” says Lyles of his first professional ambition. School, on the other hand, became increasingly difficult. “It can be hard for a creative mind to thrive in school. You see things a little bit differently, or maybe you’re able to solve problems faster than others.” Once Lyles’ asthma was under control, track and field became the new centre of his world, and his desire to compete helped him keep his head above water academically. Since then, he’s been able to balance his passions. “I still have a deep desire to create art, but my visions have started growing in different directions.”
Though the Olympian still finds time to draw, paint and make music, the greatest application of his creativity has been reimagining what his sport can be. Track and field is one of the most popular Olympic disciplines. But in the four-year windows between games, track meets fail to attract the following of more mainstream sports, particularly in the US. For Lyles, snatching gold medals and breaking world records isn’t enough: he wants to enrich and transform his sport, as both a culture and an industry. “We have to break away from the Olympic model, meaning that we can’t put all of our eggs in that basket,” he says. “We have to find other ways to modernise the sport and give it more sufficient legs to stand on.”
Bearing this aim – plus his personal love of fashion – in mind, Lyles has spent the past year introducing the concept of ‘walk-ins’ to the world of track and field. The social media sensation constructed around photographs of the outfits athletes wear when walking into arenas before games has taken off in American basketball, particularly – and helped make pedestrian entryways some of the most important menswear runways in the world. Lyles is just as certain about what the NBA is doing right as he is about what ‘world champions’ are doing wrong: and walk-ins are a big win. The hype around accounts like @nbafashionfits has helped boost the profile of players in the public eye and led to the creation of a thriving new sponsorship and product placement economy between athletes and labels. Acting as both their creator, producer and star, Lyles has launched track and field’s first walk-ins with success, and continues to help grow the following of the account @trackandfits. This, Lyles tells me, is just one small piece of the puzzle. “If you’re doing a fireworks show, you can’t start with the finale. You have to build up to it. Some people might think of the walk-ins as the finale, but for me they’re the first spark.”
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