Culture
Noah Lyles' mouth wrote the check. On the Olympics stage, his feet cashed it
SAINT-DENIS, France — Once again, Noah Lyles didn’t get out of the blocks well. His reaction time tied for the worst in the eight-man field. Slow starts cost him in the first round, then again in the semifinals.
Such felt like a recipe for disaster with this stellar field, among the most loaded in Olympic history. Jamaicans Kishane Thompson and Oblique Seville were putting up crazy times. American Fred Kerley was on his game. Even defending Olympic champion Lamont Marcel Jacobs of Italy was in good form.
To see Lyles in fifth place 20 meters in felt like doom.
“It just goes to show,” Lyles said, “races aren’t won with starts.”
But a poor start might’ve been fortuitous. Because even with all his braggadocio, Lyles is an ultimate competitor at his core. He might come across as arrogant and showy, a recipe usually featuring but a teaspoon of substance. But Lyles is a dawg in the toughest sense. His heart’s at least as big as his mouth.
Sunday night, in an Olympic 100-meter final for the ages, it was revealed.
Trailing world-class burners, coming off consecutive losses, Lyles had to summon his absolute best. The slow start triggered his greatest asset. Lyles’ refusal to lose turned this loaded final into a historic one.
It’s the fastest he’s ever run: 9.79 seconds. Technically it was 9.784. He’s America’s first gold medalist in the 100 meters in 20 years. After winning the World Championships in 2023 and now an Olympic championship in 2024, he is the undisputed fastest man in the world.
Thompson took silver with a 9.789. Kerley, who won silver in the Tokyo Olympics, added a bronze to his resume with a personal best time of 9.81. Five of the top six times were personal bests, a season best, or a national record. Seville ran a 9.91 and finished last. Just a ridiculous octet of sprinters.
But Lyles said the moment is never too big for him, instead made for him. They don’t get bigger than what happened Sunday inside Stade de France. On the biggest stage of his life, with the globe watching, in a venue that delivered chills, Lyles made the moment his own.
His mouth wrote the check. His feet cashed it.
“I want my own shoe,” said Lyles, a long-time Adidas endorser. “I want my own trainer. … I want a sneaker. Ain’t no money in spikes. The money’s in sneakers.”
The photo finish at the end. (Photo: Dimitar Dilkoff / AFP via Getty Images)
Lyles’ braggadocio isn’t empty. His calculated theatrics and thirst for attention might make him seem a bit less reverential. His arrogance prompts some to root against him.
But you don’t do what he’s done unless you’ve got heart.
Phase one of Lyles’ grand plan for immortality is complete. With the 100 meters in the bag, he now embarks on the 200 meters Monday.
Carl Lewis was the last American to do what Lyles is attempting: win gold in the 100 and 200 meters in the same Olympics. Lewis did it in 1984 in Los Angeles. Michael Johnson was the last American to pull off a sprint double. He won the 200 and 400 meters in 1996 in Atlanta.
The hardest part for Lyles was winning the gold in the 100 meters. The 200 is his main event. He’s the best in the world at it, and has been for this entire Olympic cycle.
“Pretty confident. I can’t lie,” Lyles said. “Kenny put up a fast time at trials. That definitely woke me up. I was very proud of him. He is definitely not going to take how he did here in the 100 lying down. He’s gonna say, ‘I’m going after it in the 200.’ My job is to make sure that …”
Lyles paused. Then he flashed his smile.
“I’ll just leave it there.”
Kerley, who’d been mostly quiet the whole press conference, clearly there out of bronze obligation, perked up and chimed in.
“Talk that s—,” Kerley said to Lyles.
“That man ain’t winning,” Lyles obliged. “None of them are winning. When I come off the turn, they will be depressed.”
What always takes precedence in the realm of banter is backing it up. Hubris is easier to swallow when justified.
The best chance to shut Lyles up was in the 100. Lyles finished seventh in the 100-meter final at the 2021 U.S. Olympic trials, failing to qualify for the Tokyo Games in the 100.
SEVENTH.
He and coach Lance Brauman went to work, turning him into an elite short-range sprinter.
NOAH LYLES IS THE FASTEST MAN ALIVE 🇺🇸
By four thousands of a second, Lyles eked by Kishane Thompson to win the gold by a whisker.
He is the first American man in 20 years to win the event.
🎥 @NBCOlympics pic.twitter.com/sKMer9mPOh
— The Athletic (@TheAthletic) August 4, 2024
That’s the overlooked part of all this. What Lyles has done to become a world-class sprinter in the premier discipline is a testament to his immense talent and drive. He went into a new realm, which had its great talents, and decided to take them on.
He did so loudly, with a certitude that slighted the incumbents. Three years later, he sits alone on the throne vacated by Usain Bolt. He spoke about wanting to do it. He predicted he would do it. Then he did it. The D.C. area kid pulled a Marlo and took over another turf.
That’s why when he was walking through the mixed zone and saw Brauman, Lyles started jumping and yelling. He had one more run in him this night, through the maze of ropes, around a barrier and into the space crowded with media. So he could celebrate with the coach who helped him pull this off.
The Netflix cameras capturing it all for Season 2 of the docuseries “Sprint.”
At first, Lyles thought he didn’t win. It sure looked as if Thompson beat him. Lyles said he was ready to swallow his pride and eat the loss to a worthy opponent.
Immediately after the race, which was so close it needed technology to determine, Lyles went to Thompson and told him, “I think you got this one big dog.”
In his first two races of this Olympics, Lyles couldn’t recover from slow starts. In the first heat of the 100 meters Saturday, he got behind and couldn’t catch Great Britain’s Louie Hinchliffe. He said he underestimated the field, which he wouldn’t do again.
Saturday, in the semifinals, he shared a heat with Seville. This wasn’t just any heat. Those two have history.
Oblique Seville might sound like an old-school Cadillac, but ain’t nothing slow about him. And after finishing fourth against Lyles in the 2023 World Championships, the 23-year-old Jamaican has continued getting better.
He beat Lyles back in June at the Racers Grand Prix in Jamaica. Not only did Seville run a 9.82, but he shot Lyles a look in the process.
Lyles, of course, responded on X: “I’ll remember this. See you in Paris.”
Sunday, they lined up next to each other in a semifinal heat.
Seville got a much better start and looked to be comfortably ahead. But Lyles — after his hiccup in the first round and because of his rivalry with the Jamaicans — recovered much better. This time, Lyles chased down the leader. He looked ready for a battle.
A composite image of the men’s 100m. (Photo: Hector Vivas / Getty Images)
He ran a 9.83 despite a slow start. Still, he didn’t overtake Seville, who ran a personal-best 9.81.
So when Lyles did it a third time, getting out of the blocks slow, the packed crowd had every reason to believe he’d lose. Some 20 meters in, he was no better than fifth.
But Lyles has been talking a lot about transcending the sport, elevating track to a new level. He’s talked about wanting more spirited competition with his cohorts. More trash talking. More races. More of the best facing off. This, essentially, is what he wanted.
He’d have to fight for this one. So Lyles hit another gear. The gear the great ones have. He made this race not about technique. Or the purest form. Or the most talent. It was about will. It was about the time-honored tradition of foot race being the measure of a man.
He caught the leaders. They pushed him. He pushed them. In the end was a finish, a moment, that will be remembered for generations.
When the results were in, even Lyles was stunned.
“Everybody in the field came out knowing that they could win this race. I didn’t do this against a slow field. I did this against the best of the best, on the biggest stage, with the biggest pressure. And seeing my name was like, ‘Oh my gosh! There it is!”
The difference proved to be a perfectly timed lean by Lyles. By .005 seconds, his chest crossed the line before Thompson. Lyles won because of his heart.
Required reading
(Photo: Cameron Spencer / Getty Images)
Where do you turn when you need advice? A chatbot? A life coach? A wise and trusted friend?
How about a poet? Poets may not be famous for making the best life choices, but because they subject the mess of human existence to the discipline of language, they can be as helpful as any therapist or mentor.
Good poets know the rules and when to break them, which is something they can teach the rest of us.
To wit:
Giving advice is a peculiar literary undertaking. It flourishes in certain popular genres — graduation speeches, newspaper columns, country and western songs and poems like this one — but what, in these contexts, is it really for?
I’m thinking of situations when you don’t urgently need help but nonetheless enjoy reading answers to questions you may not have thought to ask. What interests you isn’t the content of the advice — you could get all the life hacks you want from A.I. — so much as the voice of the person dispensing it.
Wendy Cope is an English poet, born in 1945, who has been a fixture of her country’s literary scene since the 1980s. More recently, her short, buoyant poem “The Orange” has been widely memed online, bringing her to the attention of new readers beyond Britain.
Cope favors rhyme, meter, brisk jokes and tart aperçus. She addresses romance, friendship and the petty absurdities of modern life with disarming good humor. The last line of “The Orange” is “I love you. I’m glad I exist.” Somehow she makes it the opposite of cringe.
This isn’t the kind of poetry you would describe as “confessional.” And yet …
Question 1/7
Stop, if the car is going “clunk”
Or if the sun has made you blind.
Don’t answer e–mails when you’re drunk.
Tap a word above to fill in the highlighted blank.Want to learn this poem by heart? We’ll help.
Fill in the missing words below. You can always refer to the reading by A.O. Scott and full
text above.Let’s start with the first stanza.
A strong sense of place can deeply influence a story, and in some cases, the setting can even feel like a character itself. This week’s literary geography quiz highlights places where authors were born (or lived) that later became locations in their books. To play, just make your selection in the multiple-choice list and the correct answer will be revealed. At the end of the quiz, you’ll find links to the works if you’d like to do further reading.
AMERICA, U.S.A.: How Race Shadows the Nation’s Anniversaries, by Eddie S. Glaude Jr.
For those of us in the national memory-keeping business, anniversaries hold near-totemic power. Satisfyingly round units of time, ideally bearing fancy, Latin-derived names, serve as the overburdened pegs on which to hang think pieces and museum exhibits, revisionist documentaries and maudlin public ceremonies. The arbitrary nature of such occasions is precisely what gives them their charge, inviting us to set aside complacency and submit to a comprehensive check-in.
In his new book, “America, U.S.A.,” Eddie S. Glaude Jr. presents an intriguing variation on the genre, seeing the country’s 250th birthday as an anniversary of anniversaries: 50 years since the malaise-ridden, schlock-heavy Bicentennial. A century since the subdued Prohibition-era Sesquicentennial. A century and a half since telegraphed reports of George Armstrong Custer’s defeat by the Lakota and Cheyenne at Little Bighorn rudely interrupted the Gilded Age Republic’s 100th birthday party.
If an anniversary offers a snapshot of a moment, the core of Glaude’s book is an old-timey photo album, a collection of notable episodes from earlier national reckonings, long-ago glances in the mirror. An estimable scholar of Black history, politics and religion at Princeton — best known for “Begin Again,” his 2020 meditation on James Baldwin’s relevance for our times — Glaude focuses, as his subtitle puts it, on “how race shadows the nation’s anniversaries.”
Such celebrations, he contends, have never really been the moments for honest self-reflection they are often advertised to be. Instead, the nation usually shatters the mirror, refusing to accept what it prefers not to see. “American anniversaries are often moments to turn a blind eye to the evils of the past and the present,” Glaude writes, “to suppress the fact of America’s divided soul.”
It’s a clever concept, and, needless to say, perfectly timed. Last year, Glaude notes, the Trump administration executed a hostile takeover of the government’s studiously bipartisan 250th anniversary planning. It is now preparing a program that is certain to conceal more than it reveals about the country ostensibly being celebrated.
Glaude, in no mood for celebration, argues that such omissions and evasions also defined commemorations in the past. In 1875, Frederick Douglass predicted “one grand Centennial hosannah of peace and good will to all the white race of this country.” He was right: The nation reached 100 years old at a crucial moment in the post-Civil War fight over racial equality, with white Northerners ready to give up on Southern Reconstruction. The occasion would help the once-warring sections to reunite around a shared commitment to white supremacy. On May 10, 1876, at the opening of the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia, the police tried to bar Douglass from the grandstand, until a white politician vouched for him.
The 150th anniversary came soon after a resurgent Ku Klux Klan successfully pushed for a restrictive immigration law aimed at keeping America a “Nordic” nation. At the lavishly funded, lightly attended celebrations in Philadelphia, Black veterans of World War I were excluded from marching in the opening parade. A writer with The Associated Negro Press wondered “what was in the breast of those black men who fought to make America safe for Democracy and on Monday stood on the sidelines, forgotten, as the Nordic strode by in all his vain pride.”
By 1976, when the nation marked its Bicentennial, the violence of the ’60s had destroyed any semblance of consensus. Vietnam and Watergate had eroded trust in the government. The commission initially tasked with organizing the anniversary was disbanded amid reports of corruption. Corporations filled the vacuum, Glaude explains, with “star-spangled whoopee cushions; patriotic toilet seats; Liberty hamburgers; red, white and blue beer cans.” The author, around 8 years old at the time, dimly remembers donning a pair of tricolor trousers.
A half-century later, Glaude is refreshingly honest about the depths of his despair. “I do not love America, and never have, especially now,” he writes in one of the more startling opening sentences I’ve read in some time. He dismisses this year’s Semiquincentennial as reaching back “to a storybook America that requires either the banishment of Black people from view or the reduction of our role in the country’s history, so as to affirm America’s ongoing quest to be a more perfect union.”
Undoubtedly true. But Trump doesn’t own the country, at least not yet, nor the 250th anniversary of one of the most radically liberatory and confusingly contradictory events in world history — an inspiration, as Glaude shows, even to critical observers of the American experiment, like Douglass. Far from the revanchist MAGA-palooza in Washington, I suspect this summer’s unasked-for invitation to national soul-searching may surprise us yet.
Despite his despair, Glaude concludes that “the past still offers resources for us to freedom-dream.” So, too, does this book.
AMERICA, U.S.A.: How Race Shadows the Nation’s Anniversaries | By Eddie S. Glaude Jr. | Crown | 270 pp. | $31
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