Paris 2024 athletics: Team USA’s Noah Lyles shares brave and inspiring message after winning 100m Olympic gold
Noah Lyles’ gold medal in the men’s 100m etched his name in history, proved anyone who had questioned him wrong and impressed the many celebrities who had watched him win. It also gave him an ever bigger platform to inspire others.
Not long after Lyles won, he put up a post on X (formerly Twitter) that said: “I have Asthma, allergies, dyslexia, ADD, anxiety, and Depression. But I will tell you that what you have does not define what you can become. Why Not You!”
Noah Lyles opens up about struggles
Lyles has always been open about his struggles with mental health. In 2020, as he could only compete in small, local competitions because of the worldwide pandemic, he told Olympics.com that he dealt with depression.
“It got to the point where I was just so deep, deep inside of myself that I was just putting on a face and doing what I needed to do. My family came down for Christmas and my Mum was really starting to worry about me. So that’s when I started ringing my personal therapist on a regular basis and it was going well for a time, but once coronavirus hit and the Black Lives Matter movement started happening, it created the perfect storm,” he said.
“I couldn’t get my needs out. I need to be active, I need personal connections, I need to be able to touch people… that’s a love language and something that people need and I’m definitely one of those people and I wasn’t able to get it.”
But in his post on X, Lyles went beyond addressing those with mental health. The World Health Organization estimates that 262million people worldwide deal with asthma and that 30-40 per cent of the world has some kind of allergies. Lyles is saying to everyone in that group that it doesn’t have to hold you back and that you’re not alone.