The American sprint king on young emerging rivals including Gout Gout, his advancing years and uncertainty surrounding the sport
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print king Noah Lyles sits smiling and calm after the storm that returned him to the throne in Tokyo, reflective even. He has expressed a desire, having now won four successive 200m world titles, to surpass Usain Bolt’s record with a fifth at the World Athletics Championships in Beijing in 2027.
But the American’s mind has wandered even further. “I have a strong blueprint of what I want my last year in the sport to look like,” he says. “I’ve looked pretty far into the future.”
Lyles rules out a tilt for the 2032 Games in Brisbane, when he will be 35, making Los Angeles in 2028 his Olympic swansong. The plan is for a final year “somewhere in between 2028 and 2032”, racing at three meets in countries he’s never been to, “so that I can touch a lot of bucket list things”.
