FILE – Noah Lyles celebrates after winning the men’s 100-meter final during the U.S. Track and Field Olympic Team Trials, June 23, 2024, in Eugene, Ore. (AP Photo/Charlie Neibergall, File)
In the second season of the Netflix documentary ‘Sprint’, there’s that one moment from the Paris Olympics where American sprinter Noah Lyles finishes third in the 200m event. A favourite to win gold, Lyles drops to the floor at the end and eventually they need a wheelchair to take him out of the Stade de France. Later on, he revealed that he had been suffering from Covid for three days and tried his best to keep things under wraps. But months later when he sat down to watch the documentary, the feeling of ‘what if’ remained for him.
“Yeah, I’m proud of the moment,” Lyles said, according to the Guardian. “But it’s still so hard to watch because I can only constantly just think what if. What if I didn’t get (Covid)?”
One of the reasons Lyles managed to even get to the track in Paris was because of the laxer conditions revolving around Covid in the French capital for the 2024 Olympics. The documentary catches Lyles, in his usual bashful ways, screaming at one point, “We are so done with Covid!”. The next it pans to his girlfriend, Jamaican sprinter Junelle Bromfield getting a text from him confirming his Covid diagnosis.
“They wouldn’t have let me run at all,” says Lyles, speaking about how things were different in Paris compared to the Tokyo Games. “I would’ve instantly got quarantined and stuck in the village for days. There were people like Sam Kendricks who weren’t allowed to compete (in Tokyo) – and his was like a week before his competition. We were getting tested every day back then.”
The documentary also focuses on how Bromfield helped Lyles stay ready for this sprint and questions whether her own Olympic campaign was disrupted due to the covid diagnosis. Broomfield was supposed to spearhead Jamaica’s 4x400m run after having won bronze in the same event at the Tokyo Olympics. She participated in the 400m event but pulled out of the 4x400m run, an event where Jamaica dropped the baton and weren’t able to finish – another cog in what made this their worst sprint performance at an Olympics since Sydney 2000.
“Unfortunately, that’s not my story to tell,” Lyles said. “One day, I hope she does tell it. It wasn’t a situation where we wanted it to happen. I’m not gonna 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 wanna be the issue here. A lot more hands got involved into the pot that we wanted to. I’ll just say that.”
