The Olympic 100m champion plays a starring role in the second season of Netflix documentary Sprint. And he is still as outspoken as ever

Shortly after crossing the finish line in the 200m final at this summer’s Olympics, Noah Lyles collapsed to the ground out of breath. He lingered there, gasping and clutching at his chest for what felt like an age before medics arrived and carted him off the Stade de France track in a wheelchair. Later, Lyles made the bombshell revelation that he had been suffering from Covid for three days. The scene, an Olympic cliffhanger that rivaled only the American’s golden photo-finish in the 100m final days earlier, is among the major inflection points in the 2024 track season offered up for closer examination in the second season of Sprint – the hit fly-on-the-wall series that follows some of the biggest names in the sport and released on Netflix this month.

Ultimately, Lyles was able to savor the bronze he won in the 200m – another keepsake to remind him of his personal triumphs over dyslexia, ADD, anxiety and depression. But when he sat down to rewatch the episode dealing with the 200m months later with his fiancee, the Jamaican sprinter Junelle Bromfield, Lyles said he could barely get through it. “Yeah, I’m proud of the moment,” he tells me, “but it’s still so hard to watch because I can only constantly just think what if. What if I didn’t get [Covid]?”