A little more than six months removed from winning an Olympic gold medal in the men’s 100 meter and claiming the title of “fastest man alive,” American sprinter Noah Lyles is welcoming a new challenge this year: racing Miami Dolphins wide receiver Tyreek Hill.
After trading barbs and trash talk for months, Lyles and Hill announced their intention to run against each other for real earlier this month. And Lyles is taking the opportunity seriously.
“I’m not here to play around,” Lyles told NBC News. “I’m dead serious about this. I’m going to bring everything I got for this.”
Lyles, 27, won gold in Paris with a thrilling finish in the 100 meter, defeating Jamaica’s Kishane Thompson by a fraction of a second. Only eight days after the race, Hill — known as arguably the fastest receiver in the NFL — was asked on a podcast if he could beat Lyles in a race. He didn’t hesitate to say yes.
The two have exchanged shots since. Lyles escalated the beef when he held up a “Tyreek could never” sign after winning the 60-meter race at the New Balance Indoor Grand Prix on Feb 2.
Lyles said he and Hill actually spoke to each other for the first time following the Indoor Grand Prix. In brief phone conversations, both athletes affirmed they were serious about facing off on the track and finally agreed to race.
And in those conversations with Hill, Lyles says he made it clear not to mistake his trash talk for light heartedness.
“I don’t want you to think that I’m just out here joking,” Lyles said of his message to the Dolphins receiver. “Let me be confident saying this. I’m your guy. I’m your guy who’s gonna to let you swing, but best believe I will dodge and you will get hit with an uppercut.”
Hill, to his credit, isn’t backing down from his decorated opponent, telling NBC Sports in February that Lyles “should be scared” of him in a 40-yard dash.
The event is not without its detractors, as some are calling it a “huge mistake” for a runner of Lyles’s caliber to entertain Hill’s challenge. But Lyles says a motivation is to bring more eyeballs to the sport outside of the Olympics, which only takes place once every four years.
“Something that’s constantly on my mind is how to keep track relevant,” Lyles said. “Track and field has a great reputation inside of the Olympics, but in the marketing sense, when it comes to the U.S., it’s just fallen short a few too many times.”
Lyles thinks his race against Hill could be a way to build enthusiasm for the sport.
“I get a lot of hate from people who don’t believe that I should be racing him. And they’re like, ‘this is beneath you’,” he says. ‘Well, apparently it’s not, because here we are.”
As great of a runner Lyles is, he may be equally adept at drawing attention. He says he’s been doing that dating back to the eighth grade, when he’d try to draw “ooohs and aaahs” from the crowd with antics before and after races.
That streak of showmanship has followed Lyles to the Olympics and beyond. In June of last year, he brought Yu-Gi-Oh! cards with him to the U.S. trials and even kept a rare one in his singlet. In Paris, Snoop Dogg wore a shirt with Lyles’s face on it to one of his races.
“I want to be more than just a runner because there’s enough runners,” he said. “But who’s the performers?”
Most details of the race against Hill are still up in the air — most importantly length and location — though Lyles mentioned 60 meters and New York City’s Times Square as possibilities. The summer is also likely for timing, as Lyles will be deep in training for U.S. championships and Hill will be gearing up for the NFL season.
And as far as nerves go, Lyles says the only thing that could make him underperform is fans not getting excited enough.
“I’m more thinking about, ‘dang, I have an opportunity to break the world record along with beating Tyreek’,” Lyles said. “So Tyreek better be ready, because if a world record gets dropped on his head, he ain’t gonna be able to hear nothing.”
