Shortly after crossing the finish line in the 200-meter final at this summer’s Olympic Games, Noah Lyles fell to the ground out of breath. He hung there, panting and clutching his chest, for some time before medics arrived and dragged him away from the Stade de France stadium in a wheelchair. Later, Lyles made the surprising revelation that he had been suffering from Covid for three days. The scene, an Olympic cliffhanger rivaled only by the American’s gold photo finish in the 100-meter final just days earlier, is one of the key turning points in the 2024 track season offered up for further examination in Sprint’s second season – the hit fly-on-the-wall series that follows some of the biggest names in sports and is released on Netflix this month.
In the end, Lyles was able to enjoy the bronze he won in the 200 meters – another memento that reminds him of his personal victories over dyslexia, ADD, anxiety and depression. But when he sat down to rewatch the 200 Million Months episode later with his fiancée, Jamaican sprinter Junelle Bromfield, Lyles said he could barely get through it. “Yes, I’m proud of this moment,” he tells me, “but it’s still so hard to watch because all I can think about is what if. What if I didn’t get it [Covid]?”
The 27-year-old had a lot to ride in his second Olympic Games. He planned to compete in four events: the 100 meters, the 200 meters and the 4×100 meters and the 4×400 meter relay. He wanted to become the first American man in four decades to capture gold in the 100 and 200 meters, hardware that would have made him the best male sprinter since Usain Bolt. He also wanted to make up for his performance at the Covid-19 compromised Tokyo Olympics, where he walked away with bronze in the 200 metres. It was not without reason that he had put a lot of pressure on himself.
But on the road to redemption, Lyles made a slight U-turn. He started a war of words with the NBA, saying the league was presumptuous in crowning the winners as world champions (“world champions of what? The United States?” Lyles wondered). Things got a little tricky when Lyles had to share a boat with many of Team USA’s NBA stars during the Olympic Opening Ceremony in Paris. Did he have positions ready in case the Americans lost in the Olympic basketball final to France? “I have no animosity toward the NBA,” he says. “Basketball was my first love. I do not wish the downfall of anyone. The reason even I brought that up was to show that the NBA is doing a good job with its marketing strategy. They are not real world champions, but they have the idea so deeply ingrained that you can’t tell anyone else.”
Furthermore, Lyles shook off his future Olympic sprint challengers from Jamaica in the lead-up to the Games (whether they had improved his times or beaten him against each other), further fueling the USA’s fiery feud with Jamaica. He disrupted the flag-waving at home by qualifying his patriotism and noting that he loved America – sometimes. “There is a duality to being a black man in America,” he says. “There are many scenarios where you love being in America, where it is very proud. We have a winning mentality. We do everything to the utmost. Unfortunately, that’s the good thing And the bad.”
For the second season in a row, Lyles is the main character of Sprint, creating a spectacle with his daring fashion and brash talk. The spotlight has made him a man in demand. “I was there recently [the fashion and culture expo] ComplexCon in Las VegasJust to see what was going on,” he says. “I didn’t tell anyone I was coming. As soon as I enter the building, everyone starts asking for photos and autographs. I walk past different stands, work with different companies and meet so many people who say: ‘We love athletics and want to participate. We just don’t know how.’ It was amazing to me.”
Produced by Box to Box Films, the same team that makes the Drive to Survive series that effectively mainstreamed Formula 1 in the US, Sprint looks to be doing an equally effective job of raising the profile of athletics and driving interest beyond the Olympics. to hold for years. In its first season, the series focused mainly on storylines involving the top American and Jamaican runners: Sha’Carri Richardon’s comeback bid, Elaine Thompson-Herah’s health and coaching dramas. In season two, Sprint spends time developing more reclusive characters like Shericka Jackson, who is reluctant to take on the title as Jamaica’s top female sprinter. Another quiet personality, former gold medal-winning American sprinter Dennis Mitchell, takes the spotlight as he takes three of the American women he coaches to the Olympic 100-meter final in one of the show’s feel-good stories.
Meanwhile, Lyles is seemingly doing everything he can to get under his rivals’ shoes, and one of the things Sprint does right is show how much time these guys spend in close proximity to each other – from their group meals to their shared shuttle rides to their tense moments together in the stadium call room before settling into the blocks on the track. “What’s crazier is that a lot of people at this level have been racing against each other since we were teenagers,” says Lyles, nodding to the rivalry between himself and fellow American Christian Coleman. “You’ll find yourself in situations where you’re probably racing against some of your best friends, or even training partners. But you have to put your blinders on because it’s about you, right? If you don’t eat, you don’t eat.”
At one point in the show, Lyles says he goes out of his way to study everything about his opponents so he knows which buttons to press. Does that also mean scouting them on Sprint? “No, Sprint isn’t going to teach me anything new,” he says. “I’ll put it this way: I watched the first season with my family and someone in the family said, ‘I thought Sprint would teach me something new! I thought they were going to the experts!’ And I had to say, ‘You Are the expert. You have been with me in this athletic world that I have lived in all my life. ”
The series excels at building up the drama in Paris, following Julien Alfred’s journey from longshot to St. Lucia’s first-ever Olympic medalist. And it really throws Lyles’ health crisis into disarray. “We will be done with Covid in no time!” he declares in one scene. In another scene, during a training session before the men’s 200 meters final for the series finale, the camera freezes as a dehydrated Lyles hesitates to grab a Powerade bottle from which Bromfield had been drinking. “You don’t have Covid, do you?” Moments later, it ends up with Bromfield receiving a text from Lyles with his Covid diagnosis and agreeing to keep the news to himself. “From that moment on,” Bromfield says in Sprint, “everything went into overdrive.”
Although Lyles would take some safety measures and advise the Box to Box crew to practice social distancing at one point, there was no way he wouldn’t be competing in the 200m final – and with Covid screenings not nearly as strict were for the Paris Games As they were in Tokyo at the height of the pandemic, if he could keep his diagnosis under control, no one would stop him. “They wouldn’t have let me run at all,” says Lyles, predicting the same scenario in 2021. “I would have been immediately quarantined and stuck in the [Olympic] village for days. There were people like that [pole vaulter] Sam Kendricks who was not allowed to participate [in Tokyo] – And [his diagnosis] was like a week before his match. We were tested every day then.”
While Sprint reliably presents more unseen details of the crisis management and its consequences, it fails to show how it all affected Bromfield – an Olympic bronze medalist in the 4×400 meters in Tokyo. When Jackson withdrew from the Paris Games and Shelly-Ann Fraser-Pryce (another central character in Sprint) followed suit, a significant part of Jamaica’s medal hopes were shifted to Bromfield – who competed in the 400 metres, but stayed outside the 4×400 meters. relay team. That quartet was later disqualified after dropping the baton in the final to hammer the final nail into Jamaica’s worst sprint Olympics since 2000.
In Sprint, Lyles notes that Bromfield “had to keep me moving all night long [before the 200m final] to make sure I would stop coughing” – an admission that contradicts previous claims the couple made certainly not living together during competitions. Did she sacrifice her Olympics for his? “Unfortunately, that’s not my story,” Lyles says. ‘One day I hope she tells. It wasn’t a situation where we wanted it to happen. I’m not going to say it could have been better. I’m just saying there were so many governing bodies involved that you would think it would be an easy situation. But it turned into, Well, we don’t want to be the problem here. There were a lot more hands involved in the pot than we wanted. I’ll just say that.”
Thanks in large part to Sprint, Lyles has become such a fixture in the zeitgeist that you have to wonder how long it will be before athletic purists berate him for overexposure — or worse, turn people away from the sport altogether. It’s one thing to showing up in the paddock for the Las Vegas Grand Prix and send Box to Box’s reality TV worlds colliding, another to take part in a 50 meter race against content creator IShowSpeed, organized and “mentored” by internet mega-personality MrBeast for a $100,000 purse. “Many people think, Oh, it’s below your level. You shouldn’t do that. It degrades the sport,” says Lyles. “But at the end of the day, those guys have several million fans, and by racing [IShowSpeed] I just put athletics on the map – and I didn’t even have to try. If we always cling to the idea that everything is beneath us, we won’t get anywhere.”