Noah Lyles explains how he fired up the crowd at the Stade de France and used them as the triumph-card in winning the hotly-contested 100m finals.
Paris Olympic 100m champion Noah Lyles has shared how hyping the crowd before the 100m finals at the 2024 Paris Olympic Games proved a masterstroke.
The Olympic 200m bronze medallist heed to his coach’s advice of hyping the crowd by jumping and sprinting a short distance as he entered the arena, something that spread fear on his rivals who were ready to throw in the towel.
Olympic champion Noah Lyles previously bragged about why it was unthinkable of him losing the Olympics 100m final.
Speaking about the incident during the Beyond The Records podcast, the six-time world champion said the hype gave him an adrenaline boost, enabling him not only to control the race but also inflict a painful defeat to his fiercest rival Kishane Thompson.
“Before I got out, my coach was like control the crowd and control the race,” Lyles revealed.
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Gabby Thomas 300m school record had stood for seven years but has now been broken by the fast-rising Canadian sprinter.
The American explained how the focus from a cameraman almost disrupted him. He said he wasn’t interested in the attention from the media but his sole purpose was to create a show for the thousands of athletics adoring fans, eager to see a new Olympic champion crowned.
Lyles, firm in the knowledge that the atmosphere was already charged, delivered a piston blow to his rivals in typical fashion, as the photo-finish best highlights.
“Nobody knows how to control a crowd like me. So I’m coming out, doing my walkout and the cameraman is trying to keep me in one sport. I’m like, you need to get out of the way because I’m not here for you. I’m here for the crowd,” Lyles, whose 200m bronze is his biggest treasure considering the circumstances he won, reiterated.
“And literally seeing everybody just go insane in energy, because it’s like, yeah, you’re seeing everybody. Nobody comes to the crowd. Why stay back there when you have this amazing energy right here?” he added.
USA’s Lyles brought his main character energy, running the race of his life in front of a mesmerized crowd. In the deepest men’s 100m race of all time, the 27-year-old dipped into victory in a PB of 9.79 seconds, pipping Jamaica’s world leader Kishane Thompson by just five thousandths of a second.
