While amping up the entertainment value and opportunities for engagement in the running world, Lyles also wants to widen the understanding of what it means to be an athlete competing at this level. In public appearances and interviews, he has been transparent about his mental health, and vocal about the role that both therapy and antidepressants have played in its maintenance. Lyles’ openness and honesty since going professional in 2016 has helped normalise much-needed conversations around the high expectations and often distorted perceptions of athletes in the public imagination. “My mom always used to say that athletes are just human beings with gifts that others put on a pedestal,” he shares. “Yes, people enjoy watching us use our gifts, but having them doesn’t mean that we are good or bad people. It doesn’t make us prophets. It’s not everything I am. I’m a human being: I laugh, I cry, I put my pants on one leg at a time.” When I ask if anything made him belly laugh recently, Lyles immediately knows the answer: “My girlfriend told me she was patient!”
Now, Lyles has set his sights on the Paris Olympics, where he will attempt a feat no sprinter has managed before: to win four gold medals, in the 100m, 200m, 4x100m and 4x400m events. Even for an athlete as gifted as Lyles, there is something extraordinary about having ambition of this scale. The athlete is amused when I ask if he identifies as ‘delulu’ – Gen Z’s internet-friendly term for a helpful, positive form of delusion. “That’s a great way of putting it,” he says. “Once I set my mind to something, I make it come true. That doesn’t mean I just sit back and wish upon a star. I put in the work. I control the natural and let God control the super – that’s how you create the supernatural.”
The only descriptor of Lyles that’s more reductive than numbers is, unfortunately, a rather common one: ‘ the next Usain Bolt’. In Paris, Lyles will attempt to beat the records Bolt set at the 2009 World Championships, making him one of the most famous athletes of the 21st century. Lyles is certainly on track to reach a level of stardom in his sport matched only by Bolt, but regardless of the outcome of his upcoming races, he will forever be in his own lane. His dreams of making track and field bigger than itself, and Noah Lyles bigger than track and field, have already come to fruition. “How do you eat an elephant?” he says before ending our call. “One bite at a time.”
“My mom always used to say that athletes are just human beings with gifts that others put on a pedestal… It’s not everything I am. I’m a human being: I laugh, I cry, I put my pants on one leg at a time”
DAZED
