The beef between Noah Lyles and the USA Basketball team may have finally come to an end with the sprinter’s recent statement. Several NBA fans have criticized Lyles’ words ever since he questioned their ‘world champions’ title last year. However, after the Men’s Basketball team recently won the gold medal at the Paris Olympics, things seemed to have mellowed down.
The team took a dig at Lyles with a post on X asking if they could finally call themselves the world champions. This got the sprinter a lot of attention, and he finally addressed the win in an interview after his 200m bronze win.
He began by clarifying that his opinion alone shouldn’t matter when it came to declaring the team as world champions. That said, he had been rooting for them and knew they’d do well throughout the Olympics.
“They’re Olympic champions! And in the Olympic champions, you face the whole world. And they saw how difficult it is. And of course they came out on top…I knew they would.”
In 2023, Lyles questioned the NBA carrying the title of ‘world champions’, citing how a tournament local to the USA doesn’t represent the world. On the other hand, several international track and field meet and events could do that since participants from all over the world compete against one another.
View this post on Instagram
The sprinting icon’s sole purpose was to draw more attention to athletics since sports fans don’t follow around a lot until the Olympics show up. And while this statement got him a lot of flak from the world, it did end up putting him out there along with the sport.
“There was a ton of countries out there who said ‘Hey!…we’re not lying down just because we don’t play in the NBA…we have cohesion, we have our own way of playing the game’.”
While the US Basketball team did dunk on him with their post, all seems well between the two parties. Lyles has come clean with his support for them and rooted for them throughout the Paris Olympics. On top of it, the discussion might soon dull down as track and field sports have attracted a lot of eyeballs recently.
Fans who know Lyles understand his dramatic flair and his bold personality, which gets him in the middle of such scuffles. However, he has maintained that he did not mind the attention as long as his sport got into the spotlight.
