Noah Lyles is the 27-year-old face of track and field in the United States. Which is why, at 9:41 p.m. on a March evening outside Orlando, four months before the opening ceremonies of the Paris Olympics, Lyles stands on the track where he has spent the last eight years becoming one of the fastest humans in history wearing a harness underneath a bathrobe.
Adidas has turned Lyles’s usual Clermont, Florida, training ground into the set of a commercial that will blanket screens this month. The final shot calls for Lyles to run through a simulated downpour. Two giant lights suspended by a 40-foot boom arm hang above him. Sprinkler heads affixed to poles 15 feet high spew cold water. Outside of lane eight, a camera crew rolls and a director fidgets. Near a small fieldhouse where Lyles and his training partners keep their lockers, a clutch of creatives from a European advertising agency and Adidas representatives sit in director’s chairs underneath a pop-up tent, watching live footage on monitors. Lyles bobs up and down in the darkness to a speaker playing Travis Scott.
A walkie-talkie crackles: It’s time. As one crew member turns a valve to increase the water pressure, and another pulls a rope attached to Lyles’s harness, the sprinter drops the robe and steps into the chilly night, bursting into frame, digging his spikes into the red track, grimacing at the cold and straining at the resistance.
“Definitely my craziest commercial!” Lyles yells to no one in particular.
He would know. Leading into the Olympics, everyone wants a piece of him. Four days ago, he was filming a spot for a high-end watch company. Only days before that, he was working on an ad for another sponsor, this time a credit card company.
But Lyles is not complaining. He asked for this, explicitly.
Eight years ago, Lyles had just graduated high school and signed a professional contract with Adidas when, in a meeting with his new agent, he called his shot: His ultimate ambition was not just to run fast, but to transcend track-and-field stardom and achieve mainstream fame. His ubiquity during Olympics broadcasts both in his competitions and ad campaigns is a testament to how successfully he has done both.
Last summer, he won three gold medals at track-and-field’s world championships, bringing his career world-title total to six, and becoming the first man since Usain Bolt to sweep the 100 and 200 at the same championship. Last month, en route to winning the 100 and 200 titles at the US Olympic track-and-field trials, Lyles entered the meet alongside Snoop Dogg, carrying a silver briefcase containing his uniform and five Yu-Gi-Oh cards. He has gone for laughs while being interviewed on The Tonight Show couch, while in other interviews he has bracingly discussed the depression that enveloped him during the Tokyo Olympics, and the sessions with a therapist that pulled him out of it.
He dresses loudly—arriving at stadiums in Gucci and Adidas collabs as other competitors stick to sweatsuits—and speaks the same way, like the time he pissed off a team of NBA All-Stars for questioning the validity of their “world championship.”
His desire to be bigger than track remains as strong as ever. It is why “ICON” is tattooed next to his abs. It is why, during the past year, he has released a docuseries on his life through Peacock, and allowed a camera crew filming Sprint, a Netflix series following elite sprinters that debuted in July, deep access into his life. It is why he’s hired extra help to run his social media. And it’s why he’s here, on his home track in Orlando. When Lyles settles into the starting blocks at the Olympics, he will be on a mission to claim four gold medals and as much attention as possible.
Lyles does not care how, exactly, people first learn about him. Only that they do. And for those who watch, he offers a promise.
“To be honest, I feel that if you watch me, you'll see a show every time,” Lyles told me that night in Orlando. “And I would love for everybody to come out and see the show—and that's everybody from little kids to Future to Lewis Hamilton. I truly believe that this sport is actually extremely fun, and I really want them to come out and watch. Because I know after they watch a race with me, it's not gonna be like anything they've ever seen.”
For Noah Lyles, speed was never an issue. Not when his mother was a 10-time NCAA All-American sprinter and his father was a 44-flat 400-meter runner who won a gold medal at the 1993 World Championships as part of a US relay team.
For Lyles, it was everything else that he had to work on.
Some of Lyles’s earliest memories are of childhood asthma so severe he went days without sleeping through the night. Or the dyslexia and attention-deficit disorder he dealt with in grade school. The combination could feel unfair, and frustrating. His mother, Keisha Caine Bishop, emphasized to Lyles, along with his brother, Josephus, and sister, Abby, the power of talking through their everyday emotions.
“That very much got us into this idea of being open and talking about our feelings and, you know, being very vocal,” Lyles said. “Communicating isn't saying I'm angry. Communicating is saying, ‘OK, why am I angry?’”
As soon as her sons reached high school and announced their Olympic ambitions, Caine Bishop, whose own career had already provided a window into the pressure-cooker world of elite sprinting, promptly arranged for her sons to begin sessions with the same sports psychologist she had seen while in college. To this day, Lyles still sees the same psychologist.
“We're not perfect in any way,” Caine Bishop said. “But we're constantly trying to work on that stuff.”
His last three years are evidence of that.
When he arrived in Japan for the 2021 Olympics, Lyles had every expectation of leaving with a gold medal. Almost an Olympian while still in high school and a world champ in the 200 by 2019, Lyles distinguished himself as fast, personable, and a self-described showman who thrives on the energy of a crowd. Yet Lyles walked into his first Olympic final in a Tokyo stadium emptied by the pandemic. Performing on the sport’s biggest stage without an audience left him hollow. Running on a knee that had developed mysterious swelling before the 200 final left him concerned. Finishing third in the 200, a race he fully expected to win, left him battling depression.
And so, starting with his post-race interviews, Lyles spent the months that followed doing what he’d been taught as a child by his mother, and talked through his feelings. Like wide receivers in football or basketball’s most feared scorers, sprinters are characterized by a bulletproof bravado. Yet to anyone with a microphone who asked, Lyles detailed his struggles with mental health and his use of a therapist. He told interviewers about one session in particular, in the weeks after Tokyo, when his therapist effectively called him a scaredy-cat for not entering other races, and how it lit a fire under him. By the next summer, at the 2022 World Championships, Lyles was back on top, winning his second 200-meter title.
Lyles believes the man who competes in Paris will be entirely different than the one who hit a career low in Tokyo, because he feels he knows himself better.
Like his mother, he is fascinated by the study of personalities, and took a Birkman assessment to spot the difference between his normal and stress behaviors. As comfortable as he is playing the on-camera extrovert, stress leads him to internalize his emotions.
“To get out of that, I have to seclude myself from the world,” he said. “I have to do what I love, which is like building Legos, making music, playing video games, you know, being with my friends,” he said. “I need like four to five days of just that, and then the energy will naturally start coming back and then it's like, OK, I'm ready to give again.”
Lyles and his mother live just a half-hour away from one another now. She attends his commercial shoots and documentary premieres. He drops by her home to hang out. They are as close as ever, and the sheer amount of attention courted by her son sparks his mother’s protective instincts.
“When I see him now, I worry about what's going to happen when the lights and the cameras go away, because it's almost like an adrenaline rush that you get,” Caine Bishop said. “Because I was an athlete before. I was nowhere on his level, but… I know what it's like to see yourself on TV, I know what it's like to see your name in the newspaper constantly, and everybody recognizes your name. And then I know what it's like when all of that goes away.”
Relaxing in a luxury RV between scenes of the Adidas commercial, Lyles shares a realization he hasn’t verbalized until now: that the amount of joy he carries into a meet correlates to the times he runs. The better he feels walking into the stadium, the faster he seems to go. That’s why last year, inspired by the pre-game “tunnel walks” that have turned NBA and NFL entrances into high-fashion runways, Lyles pushed his agent to arrange for photographers to capture his own entrances to meets. Donning Gucci, Louis Vuitton, and custom leather jackets puts him in a certain mindset that walking in with a normal bag of spikes did not. It is why no one arrives at their blocks with more pre-race showmanship than Lyles, who mugs for cameras and points at fans.
He has also found he operates best when not living in the past. Last fall, only a few months after winning the 100, 200, and running a leg of the US’s champion 4x100-meter relay at the world championships in Budapest, Lyles realized that to pull off his four-gold ambitions in Paris, he couldn’t simply train the same way that had led to his career-best meet in Budapest.
“I have to keep reinventing myself,” he said. “We were all just trying to do what I did last year and I realized when I started doing that, that's when I start getting complacent.”
His reinvention began in the weight room. Lance Brauman, who has coached Lyles his entire eight-year pro career, had been cautious during the early years of their partnership about adding to Lyles’s lifting routine. This year, coach and athlete went all in to shave fractions of a second off his start. When Lyles took silver in March’s world indoor championships at 60 meters—an event that requires a fast start, typically not his specialty—it was a signal that even though he was racing at 173 pounds, 10 pounds heavier than he’d been in Budapest, the muscle he’d added from lifting heavier (in power cleans, in particular) had translated to more force and speed earlier in races.
“If that doesn't invoke fear in people,” Lyles says, “then you guys are just ignorant to what's coming.”
By late spring, Lyles was putting down workouts that convinced Brauman he could run “9.6 high, 9.7 low” in the 100. Bolt’s world record in the 100, so fast it’s thought to be out of reach? 9.58 seconds.
Naturally, Lyles tends to think bigger. Years ago, he told me about a dream he’d first had when a teenager: In it, he is running on a blue track, in an Olympic 100-meter semifinal, when he sees his time—9.41.
In Paris, the Olympic track is purple. Not far off.
Last fall, Lyles and his girlfriend, the Jamaican sprinter Junelle Bromfield—an Olympic qualifier herself, in the 400 meters—had just arrived to a Montego Bay hotel when the manager, seeing the couple at the check-in desk, immediately upgraded them to the most luxurious suite, complete with a butler—and then comped the entire bill. And that wasn’t even the part of their vacation that left them the most surprised.
On their way back to the US, Jamaican customs officials were so excited by the sprinters’ presence, Bromfield said, that they whisked Lyles out of the line for tourists and up to the front of the lane reserved for locals.
“That’s the difference between Jamaica track and field and the US track and field,” she said. “And he’s not even Jamaican.”
“In the US, you're not gonna get that, right?” Lyles said. “Because there are just so many other stars that they have that they would put that on a platform, and they just haven't put track-and-field athletes into that equation.”
Yet.
By studying track’s power structure, and building partnerships with streaming services and legacy networks, Lyles is trying to use the celebrity he is nurturing outside of the sport to infuse change within it to raise not only his own profile but the sport at large. The most pervasive criticism of Lyles among his peers is that he tries too hard to gain attention. Yet not only does he not care—“in my head, if you're talking about me, I must be doing something right”—in recent years, Lyles has been told by powerful allies, including Bolt, to keep going. Jon Ridgeon, the chief executive of World Athletics, track-and-field’s global governing body (and a former Olympic hurdler himself) has swapped ideas with Lyles at World Athletics’ year-end celebration at the Prince’s Palace in Monaco last winter, and off to the side this spring at the World Relays in the Bahamas.
Ridgeon said Lyles’s efforts to turn staid track meets into high-fashion runways, along with his willingness to pursue a Peacock docuseries, “encourages us to see the sport in perhaps a less narrow lane, and see it in a broader entertainment space.” It is no coincidence that Sprint, the forthcoming Netflix series featuring Lyles, comes from the production company behind Drive to Survive, the streamer’s Formula 1 hit.
“The way he communicates, he’s very powerful, very authentic, and he’s got big ambitions on and off the track so it’s great,” Ridgeon said. “I just hope he can carry on winning because it’s a super-competitive space, the 100 meters, so his voice can carry on growing and growing and growing. Because if he could have a 10-year career at the very top, my God, he could make such a difference for us.”
Another indication of Lyles’s growing influence: This summer, as World Athletics officials brief the all-powerful shoe companies and sponsors about their plans for a new, global championship slated for 2026, the governing body plans to bring in Lyles to the meeting—to ask, more or less, “What do you think?”
He’s looking for nothing less than a ground-up rethinking of track’s place in the sports-entertainment landscape, a fervent believer in the sport’s product but an outspoken critic of how it is packaged and sold to casual fans. It explains why this year, he enjoyed watching as a war of words played out between top 1,500-meter medalists Josh Kerr and Jakob Ingebrigtsen, stoking a rivalry that needed zero knowledge of their best times to understand. It’s why Lyles hops and struts down the track with WWE-style flair before coiling into his blocks.
“I want to know, how are we going to shift the idea of track and field in the people's mind to where this is entertainment?” Lyles said.
But more often, he finds himself thinking about track’s future in terms of other sports’ present. Though contractually barred from detailing the exact size of his new, multimillion-dollar Adidas deal that is said to be the sport’s richest since Bolt, Lyles wants badly to convey how many digits it contains so that up-and-coming athletes understand the NBA and NFL aren’t the only places where top American athletes can get paid. He also wants track’s next generation to take something else from his example: that winning medals by itself isn’t enough to register with the wider public.
“Now people can say, Oh, maybe I do need to be focusing more on my interviews, how people perceive me, marketing—winning the medals and doing the stuff around it,” he said.
“I'm not here to try and brag how much I make,” he added. “That's truly not my end goal. I truly want to make sure that when I leave the sport there is more than just one athlete who's making the type of money that I'm making. Because I want it to grow.”
Not long ago, Lyles met up with Carl Lewis to film a Tide commercial together—one athlete vying to win four golds at a single Olympics alongside the last track-and-field athlete to actually do it, back in 1984.
Lewis emphasized for me the difficulty of Lyles’s mission. “Our sport can be really petty, we don’t see the big picture,” he said. “So now, what we should be doing is actually saying, Man, this could be an incredible thing to happen, so how can we make this happen? And let everyone understand we’re trying to help build this sport, but track doesn’t think like that.”
Lyles does. During interviews, he often speaks about the sport’s big-picture fight for relevance. The idea of Lyles serving on one or other of the sport’s governing bodies doesn’t seem out of the question.
“I don't know if I'm the right person for it, but I feel that if I was to be put in that position, I feel that I could create a team that could be able to get things done,” Lyles said. “And that might not look anything like how we have it today. And I'm not saying that I want to be that person in the future. But I do think about how to handle things, not only from being in the sport and running currently, but how it would look once I'm done, and how to stay relevant and how to stay in the game and who are the power players, because knowing that is how you know how to create change.”
This summer, Lyles will pursue greatness in 10- and 20-second bursts. But his real race will be measured in decades—and winning will require him doing everything behind the scenes, and winning everything in front of the camera, too.
Sure, there are his opponents on the track. But they’re just running that day’s race. He’s focused on the bigger one. “At this point, I'm like, yeah, it's really me versus me,” he said. “That's kind of how you have to be. But truly, that's how I'm thinking going into the Olympics and beyond at this point—because I'm trying to do things that people haven't done.”