The fastest man on the planet, Noah Lyles, is confident he'll take the 200m crown this week following his narrow photo finish win on Sunday night.
Lyes, 27, won the 100m final by 5,000th of a second over Jamaican Kishane Thompson having gone winless at the 2024 Paris Games before the weekend's finale. He will now turn his attention towards the 200m and the 4x100m relay this week.
Lyles is confident he'll have a minimum of two Olympic gold medals by the time it comes to leave Paris, adding the 200m to his tally. The confident sprinter won his first-round matchup on Monday night, running a 20.19 - but that time was slower than that clocked in by compatriots Erriyon Knighton and Kenny Bednarek.
Lyles will run in the semi-finals on Wednesday in a bid to reach Thursday afternoon's final. He even called out his teammate Bednarek. "That man [Bednarek] ain't winning. Nobody's winning... when I come off that turn, they will be depressed," Lyles, a three-time 200m world champion, said on Monday.
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Usain Bolt holds the 100m and 200m records. Lyles, as confident as ever, backed himself in 2023 to eventually top the Jamaican superstar. "I know that I'm going to break it," Lyles declared. "The second most popular, favorite hobby of humans − after watching somebody achieve greatness − is watching them fail.
"People love to watch people fail. They just do. I don't know why. It's just if somebody says they want to do something great, someone's right there next to say they can't do it.
"I can give zero cares about what other people think. Because they don't know me, they don't know my story, they don't know what I do, they don't know how hard I work, how talented I am. But I know."
Lyles hasn't lost a 200m race since he took bronze at the 2021 Olympics in Tokyo. Ten of the top 20 times set in the 200m in the last three years have been set by Lyles. "I'm going to motivate myself regardless," Lyles added. "I'm going to win regardless. I didn't need a rival at worlds to run 19.3, because there was nobody close to me when that happened."
Lyles' confident nature is clear to see, after antagonising NBA fans last year by questioning: "world champions of what?" - quotes that made him some enemies from his own country. Fans have taken to social media claiming they're ready to "hate watch" Lyles in the 200m in hopes he loses.
Phoenix Suns and Team USA basketball star Devin Booker, who was at Lyles' 100m final win on Sunday alongside his teammates, reaffirmed his disagreement with the sprinter's comments. “I still don’t agree with the comment,” Booker recently stated after Lyles took first in the 100m run. “I feel like all the best talent in the world is in the NBA, and this is coming from an Olympic gold medalist (who believes) that being an NBA champion is probably harder to do.”
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