Noah Lyles: the showman athletics needs

Sprinter shakes off racking cough, ADHD and depression in life to claim 100m title

BUDAPEST:

Noah Lyles takes pride in how he has battled his way "out of hospital and out of school" due to a racking cough and struggles with ADHD – and now sheer talent has taken the American to the top of the sprinting world.

The 26-year-old who pulled off a sensational 100m win at the world championships on Sunday possesses the charisma and charm of Usain Bolt, whose huge personality has not been replaced in track and field since the Jamaican sprinter retired in 2017.

Several have tried and failed but Lyles, with his back story of the condition that renders concentration and focus difficult, and his candid admission of battling depression is perhaps the knight in shining armour that World Athletics has been waiting for.

A documentary about Lyles is being filmed for NBC Sports by an Emmy-winning producer and with Netflix also recording a series focusing on the 100m, his story is set to reach a wider audience.

In the days to come, he will attempt to win a third world 200m title.

If anything Lyles is a showman and the lack of a crowd in the Covid-affected Tokyo Olympics in 2021 was, he admitted, a reason for his under-performing in the 200m final in which he was the reigning world champion.

"I don't think you understand how lifeless it was in Tokyo to have no crowd there. It was dead silent," he said.

Lyles has a sense of theatricality about him too having once worn R2-D2 socks to run in a Diamond League meet in Doha because it took place on May 4th – a play on the "Star Wars" catchphrase, making it "May the Fourth Be with You".

Lyles, though, would be the first to pay tribute to his mother Keisha in his rise to the top.

She would come and lie with him in bed when as a young boy he was afflicted by a cough that was so serious he would sometimes have to be taken to hospital.

"I remember days when that's all I would hear," Lyles told runnerspace.com.

"My mom would come in and we'd have these long, long nights, because I couldn't go to sleep.

"Ever since I was four I remember going to the doctor – or to the hospital – in the middle of the night, because I couldn't breathe."

Lyles appreciates the sacrifices his mother made, especially after she divorced his and his two siblings' father Kevin.

"A few times we had our electricity cut off," he told runnerspace.com.

"Dinners – there wasn't much variety for a while. We'd have a lot of leftovers. We saw how hard my mom was working."

Lyles and his mother had to confront his ADHD and she found a remedy in directing his attention into drawing, which he has taken to with gusto.

"I noticed that whenever he'd draw something, it would calm him down," she said.

While a career in art may await him – he has also playfully suggested he would like to be a rapper – Lyles has managed to channel all his focus and energy into being a track star.

He has never let the outside distractions get in the way of his competitive senses and sharpness.

He was in such a good place before the championships he said he was able to focus on matters that he thought were going in the wrong direction in his sport.

This was a long way from the anxiety-ridden and depressed Lyles of a few years ago.

Indeed he tweeted in August 2020 that he was taking anti-depressants, due to a combination of the Covid virus and the murder of George Floyd which sparked the Black Lives Matter movement.

"I just wanted to kind of break a stigma that 'people don't have to go on medication' or 'medication is a bad idea, it's for people who are crazy'," he told insidethegames.

Lyles said it got to such a stage that even if he had been told he was the greatest, it would not have raised his spirits.

"It's literally like, 'why are you telling me this thing? I don't care about this'," he said.

"So having achievement when you are in a depressed state is pointless. Everything just kind of feels pointless."

On Sunday in Budapest, though, the beaming Lyles was in a different frame of mind and could justifiably have said to Keisha: "I'm on top of the world Ma!"