Perhaps the greatest tribute you can pay to Noah Lyles is that he really is as good as he says he is. First comes the vision. Then comes the pledge, almost as if he is trying to speak the vision into reality. Finally the delivery, the nuts and screws of cashing the cheques his words have already written for him. And in about the time it takes you to read this paragraph, he becomes the Olympic 100m champion.
The new undisputed king of men’s sprinting is a kind of tortured genius, a manga and anime fan who likes painting his nails and his skateboards, who mentioned his therapist in his press conference, who understands better than most that the glory and the despair are basically two halves of a whole. Perhaps nothing captures this better than a final won by five-thousandths of a second, the breathtakingly cruel difference between Lyles and Kishane Thompson of Jamaica.
