“…I didn’t know that Erriyon (Knighton - the bronze medalist, we’ll get to him) got third until we all walked up to the podium.” “I didn’t know who got second,” Lyles said. (Photo by Hannah Peters/Getty Images for World Athletics) Lyles was so far ahead - and so unused to leading by so much off the turn - that he stopped racing humans and started racing ghosts. Rocketing out of the blocks, Lyles ran the greatest bend of his life to lead by daylight coming off the turn, burying the field from there to run a personal best of 19.31 seconds and, after 26 years, erase Michael Johnson‘s name from the books as American 200m record holder. The stage was set for the race he should have run in Tokyo, and Lyles, like the sport’s greatest champions, rose to the occasion with an otherworldly performance. And his family was out in force in Eugene - brother, sister, mother, father, stepmother, stepfather, uncle, grandmother. The stands were not packed, but the 10,000+ American fans were loud enough to send a charge through Lyles before the race. On Thursday night, with Lyles set to contest the 200-meter final at the 2022 World Athletics Championships at Hayward Field, everything had changed. “Worst-year Noah,” Lyles said, pointing to a picture of himself from the 2021 season on a fan’s shirt at the NYC Grand Prix earlier this year. Lyles clocked 19.74 that night to earn the bronze medal, but it was not the gold Lyles and the track world had expected before the season. His family was not even allowed to come due to Japan’s COVID-19 restrictions. There were no spectators in the Olympic Stadium - and Lyles, who has made a habit of calling upon fans for a “Spirit Bomb” before races (a nod to the anime show Dragonball Z), feeds off the fans more than anyone in the sport of track & field. But he started the race in lane 3 (the result of a rookie mistake of letting up in the semifinals) Lyles, never the best turn runner, prefers to be on the outside. His fitness, which had been lagging earlier in the year as he tried to balance the 100 and 200 and wean himself off the antidepressants that had caused him to put on weight and sapped his energy, was coming around. When Noah Lyles lined up for his first Olympic 200-meter final in Tokyo last year, he could hardly have been placed in a worse environment to succeed.
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