● From our sister site, TheSportsExaminer.com ●
Olympic men’s 100 m gold medalist Noah Lyles doesn’t get much respect in some quarters.
Last week, on the Up & Adams podcast from the Miami Dolphins training camp, host Kay Adams spoke to Miami Dolphins receiver Tyreek Hill about him and the upcoming season, but also about Lyles, notably his widely-seen comment at the 2023 World Athletics Championships asking why NBA title teams should be called “World Champions” for winning a domestic league title.
Hill skipped over Lyles’ come-from-behind win in the 100 m and blasted him for his bronze in the 200 m, where he ran 19.70 despite having a 102-degree temperature and Covid:
“Noah Lyles can’t say nothing after what just happened to him. You know what I’m saying, he didn’t want to come out and pretend like he’s sick. I feel that’s like horseradish.
“So, this for real, right now? Oh, so for him to do that, and say that we’re not world champions of like our sport, c’mon brother, just speak on what you know about, you know what I’m saying, and that’s track.”
Adams pushed Hill about racing Lyles, and the Dolphins receiver continued the trash talk:
“I would beat Noah Lyles. I won’t beat him by a lot, but I would beat Noah Lyles.
“Guess what, when I beat him, I’m going to put on a Covid mask. And let him know I mean business. Because I do mean business.”
Adams came back to the issue later in the show and Hill opened up again:
“I don’t think I want to race brother no more, because if I race him and I beat him, then he’s gonna complain and say he had Covid or something. And I know all the track people going to get on there and say, ‘Oh, football speed is different from track speed, and you think Tyreek can beat [Lyles].’
“Carl Lewis and Michael Johnson are going to say, ‘yeah, Tyreek, you can’t beat him.’ You don’t know what I can do, bro.”
Lyles dismissed Hill on the Nightcap podcast posted last Saturday, telling host Shannon Sharpe:
“Tyreek is just chasing clout. Anytime someone fast comes up, he would try to race them. If he really wanted to race people, he would’ve showed up like DK Metcalf. And the man raced in the 60 meters this year [last year] in the Masters division. The man dodges smoke. I don’t got time for that.
“He’s challenging me. We’re racing in the 100, we can race. If he’s truly serious about it. If he’s truly serious about it, and I’m not talking about you’re just talking on the Internet and you ain’t actually coming to me and talking to my agent and saying let’s set something up, if you are serious about it, you’ll see me on the track.”
(Metcalf, another star receiver, competed in the 2021 Golden Games at Mt. San Antonio College and ran 10.37 for ninth in his heat.)
Hill responded on X on Sunday, posting “Sign the contract and lock in that 50 yard race ….”
Racing at 50 yards? OK, so Hill is not serious and this is all talk. No one, but no one, races at 50 yards any more, even Hill. Lyles was quite right, that Hill competed in the 2023 USATF Indoor Masters Championships, winning the men’s age 25-29 60 meters in a very creditable 6.70. That’s not far from his best of 6.64 back in 2014 when he was at Oklahoma State.
Lyles, by comparison, has run 6.43 indoors for 60 m at altitude and 6.44 twice, all in 2024. Hill’s 6.70 would have ranked 294th on the 2024 world indoor list.
50 yards? Why not require Lyles to wear shoulder pads?
But the trash talk between the two of them points to a crucial difference between the NFL and the other professional leagues and track, and an issue that Lyles has been pounding on for some years now.
There are similarities between football and track in that both are – for the most part – once a week sports. NFL games are on Sundays, with teams playing odd games on a Thursday or Monday once or twice each per season. Track meets are weekend affairs, often one day, but sometimes two or three for the huge relay meets or championship events.
But the NFL, and the other professional leagues, have worked diligently to create dependable viewing windows to attract and keep their audiences and have media partners which create auxiliary programming for promotional purposes. In fact, thanks to the cable explosion, there are specific U.S. channels that are owned by Major League Baseball, the NFL, NBA and NHL.
In contrast, the Diamond League, currently the top-tier competition program in track, is all over the place. In 2024, the 15 meets (16 days) are scheduled:
● 3 on Thursday (Oslo, Lausanne, Zurich)
● 4 on Friday (Doha, Monaco, Rome, Brussels)
● 5 on Saturday (Xiamen, Shanghai, Eugene, London, Brussels)
● 4 on Sunday (Marrakech, Stockholm, Paris, Silesia)
And there’s no consistent broadcast or cable home for these events – they are mostly on NBC’s Peacock streaming service – and the arrangements for every one is different.
And during the Nightcap podcast with Sharpe and Chad Johnson, Lyles made the point again, noting an upsurge in interest from the Netflix “SPRINT” series and the Olympic Games:
“The hard part is that we as a sport are not ready for the popularity that is going to come.
“Everybody is going to say, ‘I want to be a track and field fan!’ ‘I want to follow Fred [Kerley]!’ ‘I want to follow Noah!’ ‘I want to follow Erriyon [Knighton]!’ Guess what? We don’t even have a place to tell them to go to watch the track meet.
“Because it’s in every other different country, a different place [each time]. And you got to get a VPN [Virtual Private Network to see it]. And you got to find your own Web site. You have to go on these back-alley places to just watch regular TV in a different language. We, ourselves, are not ready, infrastructurally-wise to say, ‘Hey world! Come on, we’ve got something amazing for you.’ And that’s the hard part.
“The rights for the Diamond League just got dropped by NBC and moved to Flotrack. Now we’re putting it behind a paywall and making it even harder for fans to become new fans. It hurts because I knew this was going to happen.”
And he noted that he has not signed on with the new Grand Slam Track concept:
“But the thing that’s stopping me at the heart of it is I have yet to hear a TV provider. Again, what good is it if we’re producing these great times, these great shows, these great rivalries and we have nobody seeing it. Now we’re in the same problem we’re with the Diamond Leagues and World Championships. I need to hear a TV provider and I need to know that it’s going to be able to be seen consistently.”
And Lyles is not alone. Twice Olympic women’s 400 m champ Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone – who has signed on with Grand Slam Track – said the same thing earlier this year:
“I feel like we don’t do a good job marketing ourselves, especially in the U.S. market. We need more TV deals, we need people to actually be able to see our sport and not have to pay all the time to watch subscriptions online.
“That’s just my opinion.”
Creating a coherent schedule of first-tier meets, with dependable timing and visible broadcasters is the absolute key to making track & field a bigger player in the U.S. sports scene. The athletes have never been better, but it is consistent, easy-to-find television exposure, accentuated by digital media, that is needed to break through.
And unless that comes, there will be no breakthrough. It took the NFL decades to get a national television contract, and track has been waiting longer than that.
Today, we are seeing the most private-money interest in track in more than 50 years. The NFL has shown the way, and the opportunity is there. Isn’t this the time to get the leading athletes together and figure out the way forward?
~ Rich Perelman
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