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World Athletics president Lord Coe has predicted newly-crowned Olympic champion Noah Lyles could launch his sport ”back into Usain Bolt territory”.
Lyles, 27, delivered on his promise to win 100m gold in a final that will long live on as one of the most memorable in the history of the Games, after the American snatched victory from Jamaica’s Kishane Thompson by just five thousandths of a second.
Outspoken and bursting with bravado, Lyles is a very different sort of ambassador than world record holder and eight-time Olympic champion Bolt, but at a time the sport is looking to capture new imaginations looks like the one it needs.
Speaking at the Stade de France on Monday, Coe agreed.
He said: “He’s hugely important. I have to be relatively agnostic, but if I’m wearing a promoter’s hat, then him winning last night was important, because he’s now creating a narrative that is heading us back into Usain Bolt territory and that is hugely important.
“It’s a recognisable face. It’s a face that has now got young people talking about [athletics]. Friends of mine who’ve got young kids, they’re now talking about Noah Lyles in the same breath as some of the highest profile sportsmen and women in the world.”
Lyles’ brand was bolstered further by his central turn on the Netflix documentary Sprint, and after his Olympic triumph it has grown stronger.
After he had finally finished his media duties on Sunday night, he wrote on X: “I have asthma, allergies, dyslexia, ADD, anxiety, and depression, but I will tell you that what you have does not define what you can become. Why Not You!”
As of the start of Monday evening’s athletics session, that post had 9.5 million views and counting.
In Sprint, Lyles does not shy away from his ambitions to become the face of athletics and take his sport with him, a personality that truly seems to resonate with younger audiences.
Lord Coe branded Sunday’s final, with its seven-man photo finish and every entrant running sub-10 seconds for the first time in Olympic history, “as about as close to perfect as you’ll get” as an advertisement for the sport.
But that race’s champion is not content to simply be “big for athletics”. On Sunday night, he declared he wants his own shoe.
He is gunning to be a sporting star in the same galaxy as US opening ceremony flag-bearer and four-time NBA champion LeBron James, or perhaps even forge an entirely new and unique category of fame.
And in that quest, agreed Lord Coe, Lyles is aware of what it takes both on the track and behind the scenes to build his brand – and in turn that of athletics.
He added: “It’s huge. and the smart ones get that. Your performance is your passport but promotion is everything.
“It’s not enough to be just another Olympic champion or another world champion.
“He wants to fill a stadium, he also wants to fill a press conference.
“And actually what he has to say is not just for the moment, what he has to say is actually profoundly important for the sport. There are things he has said that got us all thinking slightly differently on occasions.”
