Between Demons & Miracle Times
Lyles fuels the wildest sprinting dreams
By Tobias Nordman
07/22/2022, 8:15 p.m
Noah Lyles gives the World Athletics Championships a spectacular moment. He runs over 200 meters in spheres of the unrivaled Usain Bolt. But the ecstatic party after the furious sprint doesn’t really fit in with the moving story of the American child prodigy.
Noah Lyles had pushed the boundaries of athletics before. Two years ago he smashed Usain Bolt’s 200m world record. An unbelievable 18.90 seconds were on the clock when the American crossed the finish line at the “Inspiration Games”. The world was amazed. How was that possible? Well, the answer was as simple as it was incredible: Noah Lyles had “only” run 185 meters. He was assigned the wrong line at the start. “You can’t play with my feelings like that,” wrote the then 23-year-old on social media a little later. The feelings, they are the Achilles heel of the sprint star.
Two years and almost two weeks later, Lyles has reconciled with his world. At the World Championships in Eugene, he ran the 200 meters in 19.31 seconds. It is the third fastest time ever run over this distance. It’s a spectacular show. On the track and after the triumph. Lyles is a guy in Boltian spheres. With the spikes under the shoes and while entertaining the spectators. The 25-year-old is less of a charming boy than the Jamaican, but also someone who knows how to stage himself. Unlike Fred Kerley, the 100m champion who broke twice the distance in the semifinals, who is considered a man without a smile.
Now that Lyles had crossed the finish line, having outperformed the sprint competitors for ages, he allowed himself a little moment before the after-show program started. A “conversation” with the world-famous yellow clock on the finish line, which had stopped this phenomenal time (initially 19.32 seconds), then a kneel, a short prayer – and finally the escalation: screams, wild slaps on his gold with the flat of his hand track and the jersey tear. Lyles gave audiences what they love. What they love just as much as the duel on the track.
Get Out of the “Storm of Dark Thoughts”
But for Lyles there is another duel. One that is much more difficult for him to win. The former sprint prodigy is fighting himself. The demons in his head. Again and again the man from Gainesville suffers from depression. In Eugene he won. Twice. “I’ve shown that I can get in and out of a storm of dark thoughts.” Everything went well on these 200 meters at the home world championship. His mental state, his outstanding quality. “I’ve never had so much fun at a track and field competition,” said Lyles.
This should also apply to the Jamaican Shericka Jackson, she scratched the fabled world record of the legendary US sprinter Florence-Griffith Joyner over 200 meters. The 28-year-old thundered halfway around the stadium in a phenomenal 21.45 seconds – she was only eleven hundredths short of the “Flo-Jo” record from 1988. Lyles was one hundredth more to the world record, which remains at 19.19 seconds . And yet he fuels the wild dreams of the sprint scene. Finally a man who dominates in Boltian proportions.
“That was the last nail in the coffin”
In fact, he came once again from a very deep valley. It’s another one of those stories that Americans love so much. A hero with a serious break in his CV. In the past two years (and a few months) a hell of a lot had happened to him, too much: first the pandemic, then the postponement of the Tokyo Olympics and finally the Black Lives Matter movement. It went to the limits of tolerability, and beyond. “It was the worst in April (Editor’s note in 2020)‘ Lyles said back in August. ‘It was the perfect storm of all those things. Then you think: Okay, what should I turn my attention to now?” Above all, the civil rights movement triggered by the violent death of black George Floyd by white police officers occupied him: “That was the last nail in the coffin.”
He admitted that he had “reached the point where I said: I can’t do this anymore!” It was his mother, Keisha Cane, who made him take a serious step: “She just said, ‘It’s time you start taking medication’. I agreed because everything I did before helped me didn’t help me anymore” and so Lyle took antidepressants: “It was one of the best decisions I’ve made in a while,” he wrote on his Twitter channel. Since then he has been able to think “without the dark undertone that everything doesn’t matter”. At the same time, he was cared for by two therapists.
Moving monologue after Tokyo Bronze
His psyche was better, but his physique suffered. When the Olympic Games, they were his big dream, were scheduled a year later, the sprinter finally stopped taking his medication. He won bronze. But he wasn’t happy. As the “Neue Züricher Zeitung” reports again, it broke out of him after the run. In a seven-minute monologue, he reported weakness and pain. He poured out his heart. Lyles was no longer the sprint and show monster, but a vulnerable athlete. Another. In Tokyo, the systems of gymnastics icon Simone Biles had temporarily failed under the immense pressure.
Lyles said: “Now that we’re at the Olympics, so many people are watching us and thinking, oh, maybe they’re telling the truth. A lot of people don’t see athletes as people. They either just see us as celebrities, superhumans, or Superhero. And even though we do things that a lot of people can’t, we still have the same lives as a lot of normal people.” Athletes “have emotions too. Trust, and believe me, when we’re insulted, we feel it. It hurts.”
Not only sprinters, also artists
On the evening of Eugene, on the evening of his spectacular gold run, the pain was forgotten. Lyles savored the triumph. He celebrated it. And under the amazed and enthusiastic looks of sprint legends Tommie Smith and John Carlos, who have been absolute heroes since their Black Power protest at the 1968 Olympic Games. Lyles also raised his fist in a black glove before a race. He stretched them this time too. It was less a message than a gesture of triumph.
Before the World Cup in his home country, the new world champion reported on his long journey back for the second time after 2019 in Doha. And a post by legendary sprinter Michael Johnson, Lyles told the New York Times, paved the way for him. “People don’t go to the stadium to see you run. They go because it’s fun to watch you.” His therapist explained to him that he was not only an athlete but also an artist. And artists need a stage, an audience. Lyles understood. He had delivered. The limits of athletics, but they remain (for the time being) as they are.