Noah Lyles: “I’m gonna win two golds in the 100 and 200, and then we can go break the record in the 4x1”
The two-time World 200m champion is in confident mood before the 2023 World Athletics Championships. He spoke exclusively to Olympics.com about his goals for Budapest 23, what it means to be happy while being inconsistent, and his quest to break the world records of the great Usain Bolt.
Athletics
Noah Lyles isn’t playing games heading into the 2023 Worlds.
The double 200m men's world champion, who triumphed in an American record of 19.31 seconds last year in Oregon, has lofty goals for the next stage of his career - no doubt buoyed on by the brilliance of his recent performances on the athletics track.
At 26, he sits third on the all-time list over the half-lap distance, having taken over from the legendary Michael Johnson as the fastest US 200m athlete of all time.
But there’s no way he’s resting on his laurels just yet.
“The hundred will be a lot closer once I get the first 10 metres down, so I’d say we’re still quite a few years away from that one” Lyles tells Olympics.com, when asked how far he thinks he is from breaking Usain Bolt’s 100m and 200m world records.
“But the 200? Two years max.”
In fact, Lyles’s confidence is such that he recently set out the times he is aiming to achieve over both sprint distances. And neither of them is anything to be balked at.
‘I will run 9.65, 19.10’ he wrote in a recent Instagram post with the hashtag Budapest2023.
No ifs, no maybes, just will.
And the bold predictions don’t end there.
“I’m gonna win two golds in the 100 and 200, and then we can go break the record in the four by one,” he said to us when asked about his goals for the upcoming World Championships in Budapest.
This is Lyles at his confident best. But it’s also a new Lyles who is just beginning to come into his own.
Consistency not enough for Mr. Consistent Noah Lyles
While Lyles has been consistently the fastest man in his pet event since 2018 - running the world lead in each consecutive season, it was only recently that he realised that metronomic consistency wasn’t enough to fulfil his dreams and ambitions.
“It was draining,” the athlete says of his attempts to continue to push through every season in the same way as the last, despite circumstances changing around him. “And my agent was like, ‘We can’t ever do that again.’”
The effects of the pandemic and the events surrounding the creation of the Black Lives Matter movement took a toll on the Florida native, who says of the years between 2019 and 2021: “It was very hard to find myself in the chaos of everything that was ensuing at the time.”
But a change of mindset in 2022 has paid dividends as he takes aim at being the “best next version” of himself.
In his own words, he has learnt that “It’s OK to feel different this year because if I expect myself to get faster, it’s not going to feel the same. And those are the things I mentally have to keep telling myself.
“And it’s OK if each year doesn’t look the same. If I’m not having a good beginning, I can still have a great ending.”
Noah Lyles: “Mental health isn’t its own entity. It’s everyday life”
Lyles has been open with his struggles with mental health - a subject that some other athletes have been reluctant to open up about.
In August 2020, he published a tweet where he revealed that he had begun to take antidepressant medication and has been at the forefront of normalising the conversation about mental health in sport ever since.
However, while many see Lyles as a pioneer when it comes to breaking down these types of taboos, the athlete himself says this openness is just part and parcel of the way he was brought up.
“In our family, that’s our way of communicating,” he told us. “We’re very outspoken, very verbal with our emotions… And I guess that’s just how my mom brought us up. I’ve been in therapy since I was probably nine years old, so this is not foreign to me.
”It’s very normal, it’s natural. And so when talking about it with others, it’s just a normal part of conversation.”
This candid approach has left the Tokyo 2020 bronze medallist eager to destigmatise the discussion about mental health issues, which he sees as just another aspect of life.
“Mental health isn’t its own entity, it’s everyday life” he says. “We’re just talking about everyday things and so it just happens that you feel uncomfortable because you feel vulnerable [and] that stops you wanting to talk about it.
“But it’s still the same everyday things you go through all the time.”
Noah Lyles and the blueprint for beating an Olympic legend
It’s been six years since the great Usain Bolt retired. Six long years in many people’s minds.
Since then, the question has been often raised about how the world of track & field can replace someone who has been such a powerful force in the world of sports
Yet, recently, a new breed of athlete - led by Lyles - has shown they have what is required to be talked of in the same conversation as the legendary Jamaican.
Lyles is still 0.12 seconds outside the half-lap world record of Bolt. Yet for a man who has the ambition to become the greatest 200m runner of all time, he is convinced he knows exactly what it takes to reach and even beat Bolt’s mark of 19.19 seconds that has stood since 2009.
“The first hundred, I just need to be faster,” he explains. “I already have what I need at the end of the race but if I can make the first part faster, then it will make the second part faster.
“And the sky’s the limit.”
You can watch Noah Lyles in the 100m heats on Saturday 19 August, with the semi-finals and final following on Sunday 20 August. The men’s 200m heats take place on Wednesday 23 August with the semi-finals on Thursday 24 August and the final taking place on Friday 25 August.