Tag: Noah Lyles

Olympic 100m champion Noah Lyles said he will make his return to action in the 200m at Friday’s Diamond League in Monaco.

The 27-year-old American ran a 400m in Atlanta in April, but is yet to compete over the 100 or 200m this season.

Lyles’ season debut in the half-lap race will see him line up against Botswana’s Olympic 200m champion Letsile Tebogo.

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It will be the duo’s first race since that final in Paris last summer when a Covid-struck Lyles claimed bronze.

Tebogo heads to Monaco as the sprinter to beat. He set the fastest time of the season over 200m in Eugene on Saturday, in 19.76sec.

Olympic 100m champion Noah Lyles is not one of the two finalists for male track athlete of the year, World Athletics  have revealed.

Lyles won one of the closest Olympic finals in history to take gold in Paris in August by five thousandths of a second from Kishane Thompson of Jamaica.

But Lyles misses out as 200m Olympic champion Letsile Tebogo of Botswana and Norway’s 5000m gold medallist Jakob Ingebrigtsen were the two male track athletes to make the final.

The American was aiming for an Olympic sprint double but had to settle for the 200m bronze medal behind Tebogo and his US teammate Kenny Bednarek.

Lyles later revealed he had raced in the 200m despite testing positive for Covid-19.

In contrast, the winner of the Olympic women’s 100m final, Julien Alfred of St Lucia, is one of the two women’s track finalists.

She will be up against Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone, the American who broke her own world record to win the Olympic 400m hurdles title for a second time in a row.

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World Athletics said the top two in each category – track, field and out of stadium – were chosen from a first round of voting, which comprised votes from the World Athletics Council, officials and dignitaries connected to the sport known as the “World Athletics Family”, and a public vote on social media.

In a new addition to this year’s awards, a final round of votes cast by fans of the sport from Monday until November 10 will decide the overall World Athlete of the Year.

In the field events, Olympic men’s pole vault champion and world record holder Mondo Duplantis will be hot favourite to take the men’s award.

The Swede is up against Miltiadis Tentoglou of Greece, who won the men’s long jump gold in Paris.

Ukrainian high jumper Yaroslava Mahuchikh, who broke the 37-year-old women’s world record with a clearance of 2.10m four weeks before taking Olympic gold, will go head-to-head with three-time Olympic heptathlon champion Nafissatou Thiam of Belgium.

The women’s out-of-stadium award pits world marathon record holder Ruth Chepngetich of Kenya against Sifan Hassan of the Netherlands, who won the Olympic marathon in Paris.

In the men’s category Brian Pintado, the Ecuadorean gold medallist in the 20km race walk at the Paris Games, will compete against Olympic men’s marathon champion Tamirat Tola from Ethiopia.

Brash, brazen, brilliant. American sprint duo Noah Lyles and Sha’Carri Richardson will look to live up to their billing as Olympic 100m favourites when the track and field programme at the Paris Games starts today.

The reigning world champions are the stars of a recently-released Netflix docuseries entitled “Sprint”, giving an up-close and personal view into their lives on and off the track.

At the Stade de France – with those cameras still turning for season two – the debate will be whether Lyles, who won three golds at last year’s Budapest world championships, can beat defending champion Marcell Jacobs of Italy and go on to be crowned as the rightful successor to sprint king Usain Bolt.

The other hot topic is whether Richardson can hold off Jamaica’s Shelly-Ann Fraser-Pryce, the ageing five-time world 100m champion seeking her third Olympic gold in the discipline.

For both Americans, it is a question of redemption.

Lyles maintains that the 200m bronze he won at the Covid-delayed Tokyo Olympics “still burns a hole” in his chest.

Richardson didn’t even make the plane for Japan after being banned for taking marijuana.

“I know exactly where I am ahead of Paris,” said Lyles, who arrived in Paris after setting a personal best of 9.81sec at the London Diamond League.

“The more eyes on me, the better I perform, or at least that’s what my therapist says. When the TV cameras are on me and people are there, I am not losing.”

Richardson, seeking to become the first US woman to win an Olympic 100m title since Gail Devers in 1996, added: “When I get on the blocks, it’s about getting the job done. I know there’s joy at the other end, at the finish line.”

While Lyles and Richardson might grab the initial headlines with the finals on Saturday for the women and Sunday for the men, there will be a huge array of talent on show in the French capital.

Sweden’s pole vault king Armand ‘Mondo’ Duplantis will seek to push his own limits for victory with a potential tilt at a 10th consecutive world record, while two of the most mouth-watering events are in the same discipline: the 400m hurdles.

Three years ago in Tokyo, the hurdles produced two of the most astonishing races ever run in Olympic history, made all the more remarkable as they were in a spectator-less stadium.

First up, Norway’s Karsten Warholm smashed his own world record by a staggering 0.76sec to win the men’s hurdles in 45.94sec.

Twenty-four hours later American Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone did the impossible and improved her own world record by 0.44sec to 51.46sec.

The two hurdles race again promise to be cracking races in Paris, with Warholm under pressure from American Rai Benjamin and McLaughlin-Levrone from Dutchwoman Femke Bol.

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The men and women’s 800m races also look likely to throw up two absolute must-see races, with two world records under threat, although athletes always stress that championship running is more about medals than re-writing record books.

Algerian Djamel Sedjati has his eyes on Kenyan David Rudisha’s 1:40.91, having gone third in the all-time list in a show of form on the Diamond League circuit this season.

In champion Athing Mu’s absence, Britain’s Keely Hodgkinson comes to Paris as the athlete to beat in the women’s two-lap field, having run a life-time best of 1:54.61 in London two weeks ago to show she can upgrade her silver from Tokyo.

The time was the fastest run since the now-barred Caster Semenya in 2018, putting the Briton seventh on the all-time list and edging ever closer to the improbable 1:53.28 world record set by then-Czechoslovak Jarmila Kratochvilova 41 years ago.

The middle-distance events promise a number of top-level clashes, not least because the ever-unpredictable Sifan Hassan is following in the footsteps of Czech athlete Emil Zatopek by racing the 5,000m, 10,000m and marathon.

In Tokyo she won the 5,000m/10,000m double and claimed bronze in the 1500m.

In Paris, the irrepressible Kenyan Faith Kipyegon will be gunning for a third successive Olympic title at 1500m.

The men’s 1500m offers one of the keenest rivalries on the circuit as British team captain Josh Kerr goes head-to-head once more with Jakob Ingebrigtsen.

Ingebrigtsen is the defending Olympic champion, but the Norwegian has twice been beaten to world gold since, by Jake Wightman in Eugene and then Kerr a year later in Budapest.

“If I don’t get injured and I don’t get sick, I think it’s going to be a walk in the park,” said the always-confident Ingebrigtsen, who will defend his 1500m title, as well as aiming for a distance double in the 5,000m.