Olympic Sprinter Noah Lyles Has a Surprise Planned for the Podium

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When the Olympic sprinter Noah Lyles blitzed his way to 200-meter gold at the 2019 World Athletics Championships, his hair was spiked in silver, a nod to Goku’s final form in Dragon Ball Z. But when Lyles, 23, lines up at the Tokyo Olympics this summer, he’s considering a different look. “I’m thinking about braiding my hair,” he says. “Maybe I'll have it braided for one race, then I'll have it out for another… A lot of Black kids out there think that their hair is nappy and ugly and stuff like that. But I love my hair. You can do so much with Black nappy hair.”

That he was racking up win after win on the pro circuit with such joyful irreverence—and while once wearing My Hero Academia socks—invited a slew of inevitable (and, if you ask him, unwelcome) Usain Bolt comparisons. Regardless, the World Championship gold capped off a three-year whirlwind, in which the Virginia native cemented himself as the track world’s Next Big Thing.

And then the pandemic intervened.

“It's crazy to say, but when the Olympics were canceled, I was actually extremely happy,” Lyles admits now. “I was exhausted. It got to the point where it was like, ‘Oh, shoot, I'm depressed.’ And not just a little depressed—a lot depressed, because this had been building up for almost a year. I just couldn't slow down enough to recognize it.”

Stuck in quarantine, Lyles started seeing a therapist again, who prescribed him antidepressants. He felt like a “huge rock” had been lifted off his chest. “I could actually bring out my emotions,” he says.

His most memorable moment on the world stage happened in the wake of George Floyd’s murder last summer. Before his first major event of the season in Monaco, Lyles nervously bowed his head and thrust a single gloved fist into the air as they announced his name—a nod to Tommie Smith and John Carlos, who iconically raised their fists on the podium in 1968. “Floyd’s death really threw things into overdrive,” says Lyles. “You're watching these Black men and women and children die, and you basically feel like you're being told you're not wanted, you're not needed.” Lyles then proceeded to torch the field, clocking the single fastest 200-meter time of 2020.

“As athletes, we feel like we have to keep it in—to not be political,” he says. Lyles argues that the preservation of the sport depends on track athletes—most of whom are Black—raising their voices. “We're in danger. Do you not want the sport to do well? Do you not want the sport to keep thriving or have a safe place for your athletes to go? Being able to get that off my chest and knowing that once I do this, there’s no going back—it was freeing.”

He’s been thinking ahead to the statements he might make in Tokyo: the braids, bringing back the glove, kneeling during the anthem. He might even have one more nod to Dragon Ball in him. “I want to raise my hands during the Olympic 100-meter finals and call upon the Spirit Bomb and have everybody share their energy,” Lyles says with a big grin. “I feel like if I do that in Japan, everybody will know what that means.”

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A version of this story originally appeared in the June/July 2021 issue with the title "The Dream Team" ahead of the Tokyo Olympics which begin July 23rd on NBC.

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