One of the take-outs from Sprint, athletics and Netflix’s answer to Drive to Survive, is the confidence that exudes from pore of Noah Lyles.
It is an outlook that essentially proves warranted as the American backs up the bravado to seal the sprint double in the season finale at the World Athletics Championships in Budapest last summer.
Lyles likes to talk and such chat has not gone unnoticed by another figure in the series, Britain’s Zharnel Hughes.
While Lyles, as ever, has been big and brash all season long winning the double at the American trials, including matching his PB of 9.83seconds in the 100m, to set up the potential for a Budapest repeat at the Paris Olympics, Hughes is somewhat more underrated and under the radar.
And there is a telling moment after Hughes has won a World medal where Lyles tells him to believe.
Hughes may have had limited running this season – particularly this season where he has just one outing at a meagre 10.09 – but he is adamant he is coming to take Lyles’ crown over both distances and to silence him in the process.
“I thought ‘this guy can talk’,” he said of watching the Netflix series with his girlfriend back at home. “I knew he talked but I didn’t know he talked that much.
“Being a competitor, it raised all the red in me. I was like, ‘this guy man, he just needs to shot up’. For me, I will try to use that on the track. I will see him in London and we’ll meet there but I’ll talk with the spikes.”
There has been uncertainty about Lyles’ participation in recent weeks. He has not run since the trials and had been due to compete in Monaco only to withdraw saying he needed more time.
London is seen as the final competitive stepping stone for the Paris Games as he bids for a first Olympic title having won bronze over the 200m in Tokyo three years earlier.
The top three from the Budapest 100m are in action in the capital along with Letsile Tebogo, a surprise sprint silver medalist last summer, as well as recently crowned British champion Louie Hinchliffe, another Briton in Jeremiah Azu and South Africa’s Akani Simbine.
Some have opted to stay away from competing in London altogether, notably 1500m world champion Josh Kerr as he prepares for his French duel with Jakob Ingebrigtsen in the coming weeks.
Kerr had competed at the Olympic trials at the end of last month but, having guaranteed his 1500m spot, only did so in the 800m where he fell nastily in the latter stages but came away from unscathed.
But Keely Hodgkinson, who like Kerr mixed it up in Manchester switching her trademark 800m for the 400m, does opt to race again before Paris.
Hodgkinson is unbeaten over two laps of the track this season and there is little to suggest that will change this weekend.
British teammate Laura Muir has opted to drop down from 1500m to 800m to work on her speed while Jemma Reekie, pipped to the national title by teenager Phoebe Gill, is also in the field, so too former world champion Halimah Nakaayi.
Dina Asher-Smith will finetune her Olympic preparations in the penultimate race of the night on Saturday, the 200m.
Having relocated to Florida over the winter, she has set her sights on an Olympic medal but faces competition in both London and Paris from the quickest woman in the field in American Gabby Thomas. Asher-Smith’s GB teammates Daryll Neita and Amy Hunt also line up in the longer sprint distance.
Matt Hudson-Smith, who raced the 200m at trials, heads a star-studded field in the 400m and will bid to lower his PB of 44.07seconds set this season. He faces competition from the likes of Kirani James and British champion Charlie Dobson.
