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TOKYO: Noah Lyles revels in being a showman but the antics the Olympic 100 meters champion do on occasion upset rivals and officials. They will watch closely to see how the American behaves as he defends his 100m and 200m world titles in Tokyo.

Lyles, 28, comes into the world championships bidding to emulate Usain Bolt’s four successive global 200m crowns — and he was boosted by a thrilling win over Olympic champion Letsile Tebogo in the Diamond League final last month.

Lyles said he would head to Tokyo “with a lot of energy.”

His track exploits — the Zurich win sealed a record-breaking sixth Diamond League track trophy — and lively personality have gained Lyles the recognition he has long craved in the US.

A documentary series “Untitled: The Noah Lyles Project,” a prominent role in the Netflix series “Sprint” and an appearance on NBC’s “The Tonight Show” have raised his profile.

That kind of mainstream coverage is something which World Athletics chief Sebastian Coe said he hopes other American track and field athletes will attract with the Los Angeles Olympics just three years away.

Lyles loves putting on a show and before the Olympics in Paris last year he told GQ Sport the challenge for track and field was to persuade the public globally that the sport was also “entertainment.”

His predecessor as the dominant force in men’s sprinting, Usain Bolt, famously used his arms to replicate a lightning bolt before he raced.

The American goes way beyond that.

He even received a yellow card warning ahead of the Olympic 200m final last year for his over-exuberant entrance into the Stade de France, roaring like a lion and hitting his lane box so hard the number toppled to the ground.

Lyles — who left the track in a wheelchair after finishing third and later revealed he had COVID — also antagonized the usually imperturbable Kenny Bednarek at the US trials this year.

Bednarek was irked when Lyles turned his head to stare down his rival just before he took the tape in the 200m final.

Bednarek, a two-time Olympic 200m silver medallist, shoved Lyles in the back over that apparent taunt.

“That’s unsportsmanlike shit, and I don’t deal with that,” said Bednarek, who US team officials will hope has made up with Lyles as they pair up in the 4x100m relay team.

‘To give again’

Zharnel Hughes, who took bronze in the 2023 world 100m final, said “Sprint” proved saying Lyles had a “loose mouth.”

“This guy can talk!” the Briton said. “I knew he talked, but I didn’t know he talked that much. I was like, ‘this guy, man! Shut up.’“

Bednarek’s hackles may have been raised but Tebogo believes Lyles is more “humble” this year and “talks a lot less.”

That could be down to stress.

Lyles, who has had health issues throughout his life ranging from asthma to dyslexia and ADHD, has admitted to hiding away when he suffers from stress.

“I have to do what I love, which is like building Legos, making music, playing video games, you know, being with my friends,” he told GQ Sport.

“I need like four to five days of just that, and then the energy will naturally start coming back and then it’s like, OK, I’m ready to give again.”

His mother, former top college sprinter Keisha Caine Bishop, who brought up Lyles, his brother Josephus and sister Abby on her own, believes her son is making the most of being in the limelight.

She worries, though, about what happens once the new kid on the block arrives and replaces him.

“I was nowhere on his level,” she said in the same interview. “But... I know what it’s like to see yourself on TV, I know what it’s like to see your name in the newspaper constantly, and everybody recognizes your name.

“And then I know what it’s like when all of that goes away.”

Lyles has the chance in Tokyo to kick that moment further down the track.
 

The assassination of right-wing influencer Charlie Kirk marks a watershed moment in a surge of US political violence, one that some experts fear will inflame an already-fractured country and inspire more unrest.
”This event is horrifying, alarming, but not necessarily surprising,” said Mike Jensen, a researcher at the University of Maryland, which has tracked such violence in a terrorism database since 1970.
In the first six months of the year, the US experienced about 150 politically-motivated attacks — nearly twice as many as over the same period last year, said Jensen. “I think we are in a very, very dangerous spot right now that could quite easily escalate into more widespread civil unrest if we don’t get a hold of it,” Jensen said. “This could absolutely serve as a kind of flashpoint that inspires more of it.”
Experts in domestic terrorism cite a convergence of factors for increased violence in the US: economic insecurity, anxiety over shifting racial and ethnic demographics, and the increasingly inflammatory tone of political discourse. Traditional ideological divides — once centered on policy disagreements — have morphed into a deeper, more personal animosity. That anger is amplified by a mix of social media, conspiracy theories and personal grievances.
Reuters identified last year at least 300 cases of political violence across the US between the January 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol and the 2024 presidential election, marking the most significant and sustained surge in such violence since the 1970s.
“Extreme political violence is increasingly becoming the norm in our country, and the shooting of Charlie Kirk is indicative of a far greater and more pervasive issue: acts of violence are becoming more common, even without any clear ideology or motive,” said Jon Lewis, a research fellow at the Program on Extremism at George Washington University.
“There’s really a concern about what the blowback to something like this will look like.”
Other experts who study political violence agreed. “People are reluctant to engage in violence first, but they’re much more willing to engage in violence as retaliation,” said Lilliana Mason, a political science professor at Johns Hopkins University. “No one wants to be the one to start it, but lots of people want to be able to finish it.”
Kirk, a close ally of US President Donald Trump and founder of the conservative student group Turning Point USA, was addressing an outdoor crowd of about 3,000 at Utah Valley University when a gunshot rang out, sending him tumbling from his chair and attendees fleeing in panic.
Authorities had not yet publicly identified a suspect by Wednesday evening, nearly six hours after the shooting. FBI Director Kash Patel said an unnamed “subject” had been detained for questioning and then released.
Kirk, 31, was a pioneer in the conservative movement and harnessed the power of social media to lure millions of young Americans into Trump’s MAGA base.
“No one understood or had the Heart of the Youth in the United States better than Charlie,” Trump said in a social media post announcing Kirk’s death.

“Vicious spiral”
Trump himself was the subject of two assassination attempts last year. In one, the shooter was killed by authorities seconds after he fired. In the other, a man was arrested carrying a rifle and scope near a Palm Beach golf club where Trump was playing. His trial began this week.
In addition to those, two recent high-profile attacks by right-wing conspiracy theorists this year shook lawmakers and government workers across the country. In June, a Christian nationalist murdered a senior Democratic state lawmaker and her husband in Minnesota, and wounded a second Democrat. In August, a gunman obsessed with COVID-19 conspiracies sprayed gunfire at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention headquarters in Atlanta, killing a police officer.
Since January, at least 21 people have been killed in political violence incidents, 14 of them in a car bomb attack in New Orleans by a jihadist claiming loyalty to the Daesh group early on New Year’s Day.
In May, a pro-Palestinian activist murdered two Israeli embassy employees in Washington, and told police after his arrest, “I did it for Gaza,” according to court documents.
In July, a group of at least 11 militants in black military-style clothing attacked an immigration detention center in Texas, the Justice Department said. The group set off fireworks, spray-painted “traitor” and “ICE Pig” on vehicles, and shot a responding police officer in the neck, wounding him, while another sprayed gunfire at detention guards, the FBI said.
Since returning to office, Trump has scaled back efforts to counter domestic extremism, redirecting resources toward immigration enforcement and citing the southern border as the top security threat.
Jensen, the University of Maryland researcher who tracks violence for the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism, said the future appears grim.
“This is an administration that, whether you agree with it or not, has made profound changes to this country in the eight months it’s been in office,” he said. “Some people love it, some people hate it. The people that hate it are starting to act out. People who love it are going to act out against those people that hate it, and it becomes a vicious spiral that could lead us into something really, really bad.”