Olympics 2024 100m champion Noah Lyles is aiming for a title not even Michael Johnson managed – we ought to salute him
NOAH LYLES is the newly crowned fastest man on the planet.
As the Olympic 100 metres champion, he possesses one of the greatest titles in all of sport.
Yet while Lyles is a maverick self-publicist, he needs to be. Like virtually all of the 10,714 athletes competing at the Paris Games, the American is still fighting for recognition.
After winning one of the most dramatic sprints of all time, Lyles said his biggest ambition was to have a sneaker — that’s a trainer to you and me — named after him.
Not even Michael Johnson, one of America’s greatest track stars of recent decades, was given that accolade, bemoaned Lyles, and athletics is a “global sport” he pointed out.
Lyles is one of those ‘typical Americans’ that most English people instinctively dislike. He’s a show-off, a limelight-hogger, a loudmouth.
If a biblical flood were coming and this particular Noah was building an ark, you’d suspect he’d build it just for himself.
And yet Lyles is strangely likeable. Particularly because, atypically for an American, he appreciates the global nature of sport.
In August last year, while competing at the World Championships in Hungary, he caused a stir by taking a pop at US basketball.
He said: “You know the thing that hurts me the most is that I have to watch the NBA Finals and they have ‘world champion’ on their head.
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“World champion of what? The United States?
“Don’t get me wrong. I love the US, but that ain’t the world.
“We are the world. We have almost every country out here fighting, thriving, putting on their flag to show that they are represented. There ain’t no flags in the NBA.”
That comment will attract a hearty ‘hear, hear’ across the pond, where we’ve long been asking how baseball’s ‘World Series’ is only ever contested by American teams. And possibly Canadians although we’re not too sure about the pinstriped rounders.
But to be fair to the old Septic Tanks, at least they have four big sports — basketball, baseball, American football and ice hockey — in which the Canadians definitely join in.
In Britain every sport other than football is now a minority sport.
And this is why the Olympics bring such blessed relief. It is a wonderful fortnight in which 30 or more other sports are enjoyed and embraced.
Here in Paris, it’s heartening to hear the folks back home waxing lyrical about triathlon and fencing and badminton and table tennis — a sport played so rapidly at the highest level that you doubt whether there is actually even a ball.
I feel glad to have come from the Grandstand generation, when kids would marvel at a succession of different sports on Saturday afternoons in that great sporting magazine show fronted by the likes of Des Lynam.
Before the vidiprinter churned out the football results, rallying was followed by rugby league, was followed by domestic swimming meets.
Anyone in their 40s or 50s can tell you Wigan were very good at rugby league and swimming.
And they’d share the sentiments of the indie geniuses Half Man Half Biscuit who told us that “the wonderful dexterity of Hannu Mikkola makes me want to shake hands with the whole of Finland”.
Misty, water-coloured memories of the way we were when, back in the 1980s, our most famous sportsmen were Ian Botham, Daley Thompson, Seb Coe, Steve Davis and Nick Faldo, with barely a footballer to rank anywhere close.
And the keenest worldwide rivalries weren’t Messi v Ronaldo but Borg v McEnroe, then Senna v Prost. Last week we asked ‘Is Andy Murray Britain’s greatest ever sportsman?’ as he took his final bow after an extraordinary career.
But while there’s no future in nostalgia, those of us who remember Jocky Wilson sinking pints and smoking fags at the oche will doubt if Murray was even Scotland’s greatest ever athlete.
Now, despite the supposed endlessness of the internet and a multitude of TV stations, we exist in a sporting monoculture where football dominates, smothering the life out of everything else.
Even though these last two decades — and not the 1980s — have been a golden era for the British Olympic movement, most of our Olympians, even our dozens of medallists, will sink back into obscurity for another four years or perhaps forever.
Participation levels in Olympic sports will increase around now and hopefully many kids will be sufficiently inspired to take up gymnastics or canoe slalom or three-day eventing and stick with them to end up as future Olympians.
But ten days from now, Manchester United will play Fulham and another nine months of the Premier League will swallow us up, with Tom Pidcock and Alex Yee and Bryony Page largely forgotten.
Lyles will be famous, perhaps almost as famous as Usain Bolt and he might even have a ‘sneaker’ named after him.
But while we might bristle at the brashness of the rapidest man on the planet, we should salute him for talking up the joys of globalisation and of wide-ranging sporting interests.
Plenty of people sneer about the idea of diversity but Grandstand was a kind of diversity we could all cherish. Lyles would have loved it.
He’d have probably enjoyed turning over to watch Dickie Davies hosting World of Sport and marvelling at Big Daddy and Giant Haystacks and horse racing’s ITV Seven as well.
The world of sport is a wonderful, eclectic thing. And the Olympic Games is the showcase which reminds us as much.
CLASS APART
WHEN the England cricket team was bad — often laughably bad — during the 1990s, Graham Thorpe was one of its few consistently world-class players.
As it emerged from the dark in the early 2000s, Thorpe was the steady older hand who helped usher in a new golden age.
Yet Thorpe’s final Test came against Bangladesh in June 2005, just a month before the start of the greatest series of all — that summer’s epic Ashes — when he made way for Kevin Pietersen.
Thorpe, who has died at the tragically young age of 55, fully deserved to be on that open-top bus parade through London after the Aussies had been vanquished.
GAMES TAKES
A FEW observations from the Olympics.
Gymnasts are REALLY short, like even shorter than jockeys.
Handball is bloody brilliant. Why don’t we love it in Britain, as they do in most of Europe?
Athletics field eventers lead a lonely life.
They contest the greatest moments of their careers tucked away in the corner of a packed stadium while being virtually ignored by tens of thousands of people.
Plastic Bertrand’s song Ca Plane Pour Moi, which is played before every Olympic event, is a serious earworm.
GONGS SHOW
ANOTHER great thing about the Olympics is that it debunks the myth that ‘first is first and second is nowhere’.
Those who finish second and third are rightly celebrated with gongs and places on the podium.
If the same applied in football, Harry Kane would be one of our most decorated sportsmen, dripping with silverware as a runner-up in the Champions League, Premier League, European Championship and League Cup.
He’d have even got a bronze in the Bundesliga last term… and for finishing third in a two-horse race with Spurs behind Leicester in 2016.