Shortly after crossing the finish line in the 200m final at this summer’s Olympics, Noah Lyles collapsed to the ground out of breath. He lingered there, gasping and clutching at his chest for what felt an age before medics arrived and carted him off the Stade de France track in a wheelchair.
Later, Lyles made the bombshell revelation that he had been suffering from Covid for three days. The scene, an Olympic cliffhanger that rivalled only the American’s golden photo-finish in the 100m final, is among the major inflection points in the 2024 track season offered up for closer examination in the second season of Sprint – the fly-on-the-wall series that follows some of the biggest names in the sport and released on Netflix this month.
Related: Athletics has been searching for the new Bolt – Lyles has grabbed the baton | Jonathan Liew
Lyles was able to savour the bronze he won in the 200m – another keepsake to remind him of his triumphs over dyslexia, ADD, anxiety and depression. But when he sat down to rewatch the episode dealing with the 200m with his fiancee, the Jamaican sprinter Junelle Bromfield, Lyles said he could barely get through it. “I’m proud of the moment,” he says, “but it’s still so hard to watch because I can only constantly just think what if. What if I didn’t get [Covid]?”
The 27-year-old had a lot riding on his second Olympics. He planned to compete in four events – the 100m, 200m and the 4x100m and 4x400m relays. He aimed to become the first American man in four decades to strike gold in the 100m and 200m, hardware that would have stamped him as the best male sprinter since Usain Bolt. He also wanted to make up for his showing at the Covid-compromised Tokyo Olympics, where he won bronze in the 200m. Not for nothing, he had put a fair amount of that pressure on himself.
But on the road to redemption Lyles took a bit of a heel turn. He started a war of words with the NBA, saying the league was presumptuous to crown its winners world champions (“world champion of what? The United States?”). Things got a little awkward when Lyles had to share a boat with many of Team USA’s NBA players at the Paris opening ceremony.
Did he have any posts ready to go in the event the Americans lost in the Olympic basketball final against France? “I have no animosity toward the NBA,” he says. “Basketball was my first love. I’m not wishing for the downfall of anybody. The reason I brought that up was to show that the NBA does a good job with its marketing strategy. They’re not actual world champions, but they’ve ingrained the idea so deeply that you can’t tell anybody anything else.”
Lyles shrugged off his would-be Olympic sprint challengers from Jamaica in the lead-up to the Games (whether they had bettered his times or beat him head to head), adding fuel to the US’s track feud with Jamaica.
He upset the flag-wavers back home by qualifying his patriotism, noting that he loved America – at times. “There’s a duality to being a Black man in America,” he says. “There’s a lot of scenarios where you do love being in America, where it is very prideful. We have a winner’s mentality. We do everything to the extreme. Unfortunately, that’s the good and the bad.”
For the second straight season, Lyles holds focus as Sprint’s main character, creating spectacle with his bold fashions and brash talk. The spotlight has made him sought after. “I recently went to [the fashion and culture expo] ComplexCon out in Las Vegas, just to see what was going on,” he says. “I didn’t tell anyone I was coming. As soon as I stepped foot in the building, everybody starts asking for pictures and autographs. I’m walking past different booths, doing collabs with different companies, meeting so many people that say, ‘We love track and field and want to get involved. We just don’t know how.’ It was astonishing to me.”
Produced by Box to Box Films, the same outfit that makes the Drive to Survive series that effectively mainstreamed Formula One in the US, Sprint appears to be doing a similarly good job of raising track and field’s profile and sustaining interest beyond the Olympic years. The first season mostly concentrated on the top US and Jamaican runners – Sha’Carri Richardon’s comeback bid, Elaine Thompson-Herah’s health and coaching dramas. In sSeason two, Sprint spends time developing more withdrawn characters such as Shericka Jackson, loath to take the mantle as Jamaica’s top female sprinter.
Another low-key personality, the former gold medal-winning American sprinter Dennis Mitchell, takes a turn in the spotlight while getting three of the US women he coaches into the 100m Olympic final in one of the show’s feelgood stories.
All the while Lyles seemingly does everything possible to get under his rivals’ skin and one thing Sprint does well is show just how much time these guys spend in close proximity to one another – 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 track. “What’s crazier is a lot of the people who are on this level, we’ve been racing against each other since we were teenagers,” says Lyles, nodding at the rivalry between himself and his compatriot Christian Coleman. “You get into situations where you’re probably racing some of your closest friends, if not training partners. But you have to put your blinders on because it’s about you, right?”
At one point in the show, Lyles says he makes a point of studying everything about his opponents so he knows what buttons to push. Does that include scouting them on the show? “Sprint isn’t going to teach me anything new,” he says. “I’ll put it like this: I watched the first season and somebody in the family was like, ‘I thought Sprint was gonna teach me something new. I thought they were going to the experts.’ And I had to be like, ‘you are the expert. You’ve been with me in this track and field world that I live in my whole life.’”
The series excels at building the drama in Paris, following Julien Alfred’s journey from longshot to St Lucia’s first Olympic medalist. And it sets up Lyles’s finals health crisis quite archly. “We are so done with Covid,” he declares in one scene. In another scene, during a training session before the 200m men’s final for the last episode, the camera tarries as a parched Lyles hesitates to take a Powerade bottle Bromfield had drunk from. “You don’t got Covid, do you?”
Moments later, it cuts to Bromfield receiving a text from Lyles with his Covid diagnosis and agreeing to keep the news to herself. “From that moment,” Bromfield says in Sprint, “everything just went spiralling out.”
Though Lyles would take some safety precautions, advising the Box to Box crew to keep their distance at one point, there was no way he was not going to run in the 200m final and with Covid screenings nowhere near as strict for the Paris Games as they were in Tokyo at the height of the pandemic, clearly, no one was going to stop him if he could keep a lid on his diagnosis.
“They wouldn’t have let me run at all,” says Lyles, gaming out the same scenario in 2021. “I would’ve instantly got quarantined and stuck in the [Olympic] village for days. There were people like [the pole vaulter] Sam Kendricks who wasn’t allowed to compete [in Tokyo] – and [his diagnosis] was like a week before his competition. We were getting tested every day back then.”
While Sprint dependably relays more unseen details from the crisis management and the fallout, what it does not show is how it affected Bromfield – a 4x400m Olympic bronze medalist in Tokyo. When Jackson dropped out of the Paris Games and Shelly-Ann Fraser-Pryce (another central character in Sprint) followed suit, a significant portion of Jamaica’s medal hopes were shunted on to Bromfield – who competed in the 400m but was left off the 4x400m relay team.
That quartet was disqualified after dropping the baton in the final to drive the last nail in Jamaica’s worst sprint Olympics since 2000.
In Sprint, Lyles lets slip that Bromfield “had to keep moving me through the night [before the 200m final] to make sure I would stop coughing” – an admission that butts against previous claims the couple made about definitely not cohabitating during competitions.
Did she sacrifice her Olympics for his? “Unfortunately, that’s not my story to tell,” Lyles says. “One day, I hope she does. It wasn’t a situation where we wanted it to happen. I’m not going say it could’ve been handled better, I’m just saying there were so many governing bodies that were involved where you would think it would be an easy situation to handle. But it turned into, well, we don’t want to be the issue here. A lot more hands got involved into the pot that we wanted to. 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 much longer it will be before track and field purists call him out for overexposure – or worse: turning people off the sport altogether. It is one thing to turn up in the paddock for the Las Vegas Grand Prix and send Box to Box’s reality TV worlds colliding, another to compete in a 50m race against the content creator IShowSpeed organised and “officiated” by the internet mega-personality MrBeast for a $100,000 purse.
“A lot of people think, oh, it’s beneath you. You shouldn’t be doing that. It degrades the sport,” Lyles says. “But those men have multiple millions of fans, and by racing [IShowSpeed] I just put track and field on the map – and I didn’t even have to try. If we’re always going to keep this idea that everything is beneath us, then we’re not going to get anywhere.”
Sprint is available to stream on Netflix now
