Noah Lyles Is Helping Spearhead the Yu-Gi-Oh! Craze

The gold medalist and self-proclaimed world’s fastest nerd is an avid fan of the trading card game, which just held its world championships.

Lyles broke out a coveted card at the Olympic trials. / Christian Petersen/Getty Images

SEATTLE – The drumbeats thundered at 9:30 a.m., followed by chants, followed by an epic build, atmosphere heightening, electric charge announcing the obvious. A major event was taking place, in competition form, and it was held inside what’s typically a live music venue, with nary an instrument in sight.

Somehow, soon, this would all make sense.

It was the first Sunday of another NFL season, but this wasn’t for the Seahawks. It was staged by a company, Konami, an entertainment company and operator of the Yu-Gi-Oh! franchise, which started as a Japanese manga series … that was spun into multiple anime series … that broadened and widened until Yu-Gi-Oh! ranked among the highest-grossing and most popular media franchises in the world.

Events like this spearheaded that growth, including television shows, films, spinoffs, a novel, video games and the trading card games that now form the Yu-Gi-Oh! world championships. Like the one announced by beats emanating from drums the size of monster truck tires on a Sunday in September.

Security roamed, keeping the riffraff out of the private event. Cameras filmed the proceedings for a live Web stream. Announcers analyzed the teams.

On the stage, Master Duel competitors would soon deploy strategies, drawing cards from one of two decks chosen from pre-selected options among 10,000 or so available cards. They’d use what they drew—each has point tallies, or other powers, or both—to attack opponents in individual match-ups. Those are added to delineate winners from losers. Three on three (but with team scores only used in this Duel format). Opponent swaps after each round. Players choosing decks before each match. Unwanted, drawn cards discarded into the “graveyard.” First team to five individual victories advances.

Buckle up, for a peek into the Yu-Gi-Oh! Trading Card Game world championships.

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Only three months earlier, Noah Lyles had pushed the franchise even deeper into the spotlight. A self-described YGO fanatic, the sprinter entered the USA track and field Olympic trials wheeling a carry-on, on top of which rested a silver briefcase. Only one person knew what might be inside.

Snoop Dogg got the scoop, naturally—and only because he carried this briefcase onto the track at Hayward Field. Yu-Gi-Oh! cards were inside. Snoop opened the case. Lyles reached in, then pulled out the head of Exodia the Forbidden One, then held it up for television cameras.

Why Lyles chose this approach wasn’t immediately clear. The millions in America who love YGO and its card games probably smiled and nodded knowingly. Everyone else scrambled to Google. In those moments and their aftermath, the sprinter highlighted what has become more and more obvious: that the YGO world championships, while not a sport exactly, and also not that unlike, say, the Fortnite World Cup, has deep and broadening ties to sports.

In the months since Lyles pulled those cards, he learned even more about the cards’ collective reach. Like the scene he described in a video he posted on his social media accounts, Lyles says, “I just got an upgraded room at the St. Regis because the woman saw me pull out a Yu-Gi-Oh! card at the Olympic trials.” Not for his 100-meter gold in Paris. For his YGO fandom.

"Never stop being a nerd!” he added.

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Half the audience in Seattle features competitors who aren’t, at that moment, competing. They’re wearing jerseys (white, red, gray, blue) and following the action. They didn’t carry briefcases, like Lyles, but they did saunter onto their field of competition. Many clutch coffee cups, or energy drinks, as they recline up front.

Each loosely presents as an athlete. Some count athletes in more typical sports as fans. Like a pair of NFL players—George Kittle of the 49ers and Jamaal Williams of the Saints—who both filmed videos detailing their respective YGO fandom that the company would broadcast at its championships. Kittle, according to YGO executives, embodies one of the two most prominent portions of its fanbase. Those who primarily collect cards. Williams does that, too, while standing in for the other significant portion, the one that collects and plays.

The four world championship events were created and developed by the Tokyo-based Konami. It took one concept from the stories in the series—Duel Monsters—to form the games and their leagues that culminate every year in this competition. Players become Duelists, and they deploy combinations of cards that feature monsters, traps, spells and counters (all vary in type and potency) to seize glory or lament defeat.

This is not a new endeavor. Worlds have existed, in various forms, for most of this century. The game itself is so popular that, in 2011, Guinness World Records tabbed it the top-selling trading card game ever. Guinness listed the YGO tally of cards sold then in excess of 25 billion. Ten years later, that number had swelled by 10 billion more.

The game and the series featured sports from the outset. Not a handful, either. In the Yu-Gi-Oh! story, more than a dozen athletic endeavors made narrative cameos, from air hockey to skydiving to table tennis and tennis (and cheerleading, show jumping and bowling).

Many athletes, like Lyles, were drawn less to the sports and more to the world, or the world plus the competitive nature of games. Many have deep, lasting, widespread anime obsessions, which even The New York Times recently featured. Lyles is one of those. So is teammate Chase Jackson (Ealey), a world champion who competes in shotput and discus. She dared Lyles to bring Exodia to the trials. He accepted the challenge, if she would perform something known as the “Rock Lee Weight Drop,” from Naruto, an anime series. Soon, Lyles presented as an anime scholar and member of whatever YGO fan segment most closely resembles the Browns Dawg Pound. He’s that rabid, the self-proclaimed world’s fastest nerd. He didn’t shut down questions related to whether he’d grace a YGO card. Nor did Konami execs.

After all, they understand what Yu-Gi-Oh! translates to: King of Games.

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The drums were part of the spectacle at the championships in Seattle. / Greg Bishop/Sports Illustrated

Amid the pageantry in Seattle, many in attendance were aware of petitions from recent years, each of which argued for Yu-Gi-Oh! as an Olympic sport. One essay that called for signatures came from Inked Gaming (and carried an elite byline, Vince the Prince). The most popular petition—created by Xiran Jay Zhao, a YouTube content creator who often covers card gaming from Canada—has nearly 18,000 signatures.

The athletes she advocates for soon bounced onto the stage for introductions. Many raised fists. Many wore glasses. Others flashed thumbs, waved fingers or simply stared straight into the camera, projecting intense, major-event focus.

It was time: to get things started, crown champions and beam broadcasts to live watch parties at YGO flagship stores all over North America and Latin America. There were four categories in the championships: the Trading Card Game, the Duel Links  (Speed Duel) format, the Duel Links (Rush Duel) format and the Master Duel, where the semifinals were about to start.

As Yumi Hoashi watched this world she helped create come to life once more, she couldn’t help but drift back to the person responsible for the Yu-Gi-Oh! franchise, Kazuki Takahashi. Like her, many refer to him as, simply, The Creator. And, among Takahashi’s initial aims, he emphasized one over all others: He wanted the story he wrote and animated to transcend borders, connecting people from disparate worlds, in whatever form it took.

These championships featured teams from Japan, where YGO is most popular. There were also teams from the U.S., other parts of Asia, Latin America and Europe. 

Their shared love language was YGO, those cards. Many had become friends; some even vacationed together. All of which sorta sounds like … the Olympics, no? Teams from all over the world. Communities that form within cutthroat crucibles of competitive endeavors. Bonding over shared passions. A purity—non-steroid track version—to the pursuit.

So when Billy Brake, a Konami executive and retired competitor who once ranked among the world’s top players, saw Lyles and those cards online, the level of elation that surged through him was similar to when he opened his first Yu-Gi-Oh! pack, the one his mother purchased for him in the early 2000s. “The cards can help inspire him,” Brake says. “(Lyles) can channel that energy to motivate himself, taking a piece of our competition into his own.”

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The Master semi-unspooled with competitive ferocity. It gushed from six men sitting in gaming chairs, plying their talents on desktop computer screens and beamed all over the world.

All had pre-selected two decks beforehand, choosing anywhere from around 40 to around 60 cards they could draw from. There’s strategy in that, too. Pick too many and the game’s inherent variance becomes harder to impact. Pick too few and run out of options when needing to counter opponents’ moves.

Meanwhile, a mild controversy had popped up right before the competition. Nothing says sports like lists of decks chosen by teams being leaked online, for this Master Duel format, specifically. Within a game featuring no shortage of analytics (think: spreadsheets, analyses, case studies of specific teams or players ) this could theoretically have tipped the competitive balance.

No competitor held a higher participation rate at worlds than Joshua Schmidt, a German world champion who hosts a wildly popular, YGO-specific YouTube channel for his more than 69,000 subscribers. Despite his qualification rate, Schmidt hadn’t yet joined Shunsuke Hiyama, the only player in the game’s history to have won multiple championship titles.

Lyles had begun to lay out one difficult but impenetrable, if successful, strategy at the track trials. He first flashed Exodia the Forbidden One, which is similar to other Forbidden One cards but more powerful. Exodia, in the fictional YGO world, is a Tom Brady-level monster, an anime GOAT; so powerful, in fact, that the original card was taken out of the competition and split into five pieces, the hope being they would never be combined for fear of the combination’s destructive power.

Nerd out here: Any player who puts all five cards together to form Exodia in full wins that game, automatically. Lyles pulled out three of the five; thematically, this signaled that he planned to compile something epic. The next day, he completed both Exodia and his card-game-meets-track metaphor. (One player, in a long-ago world championships, pulled off the rare Exodia completion. The crowd, understandably, went bananas.)

Lyles told interviewers, “It’s time to build the whole thing. I got the left and right arms, and I got the legs coming tomorrow.” One journalist, confused, asked for clarity. “All the Yu-Gi-Oh! fans know,” Lyles said. “Something big is coming.”

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The Master Duel clash began. Team Snipehunters, the 2023 champion, vs. team Hero’s Future. All desired the prizes given to the winners, a trophy and the item they really want—one rare-upon-rare Yu-Gi-Oh! card, so rare it cannot be used in future competitions, several of which are displayed in glass cases on the stage. There’s tension, suspense, back-and-forth action and, eventually, cheers from one side and tears from the other. There are, also, heavy Dodgeball vibes. This game is made for ESPN8 the Ocho.

Snipehunters featured Schmidt, described by Brake as a YGO Michael Jordan. Brake knows him well, having competed on the circuit before landing with Konami. Brake fell for YGO while growing up in Dallas, from the moment he first spied a pack of cards. The packaging featured the initial main YGO character, his hair spiked in every direction.

Eventually, Brake’s parents started taking him to tournaments. He started winning, moving up, carving out a Yu-Gi-Oh! career. He even beat Schmidt, a rival, back in the day. He met his girlfriend through the game. Discovered his life’s passion in it. Made that into a career. Yu-Gi-Oh! changed his life.

Snipehunters lost the first two individual matches. But they won the third, then pulled ahead, 4–2, on the cusp of advancing to the finals. Then Hero’s upended what seemed like their opponent’s immediate future, tying the semi at four wins apiece. Schmidt delivered in the tie-breaker, pushing Snipehunters back into the final, where the outfit it beat last, Team 7, would be waiting.

The game they were playing most closely resembled chess. Every move seemed tied to not only the next but to future decisions, combinations, attacks.

In the final, Team 7 exacted its revenge. Each member took home this year’s coveted card: Dragon of Illumination, Sanctuary’s Shield. There were post-game interviews. A video of Zayn Malik, One Direction singer, describing his deep fandom. Malik noted his love of Exodia cards, tying him to Schmidt and Lyles in perhaps the oddest combination of an ideal, random dinner group imaginable.

Soon, the event concluded, marking two days stuffed with tasty storylines, tension and suspense, with new competitions and new champions, with history; the works. The Master Duel was part of that, in the rematch and the flipped result. Meanwhile, in the showcase, what’s called the Yu-Gi-Oh! Trading Card Game Main Event, Ruben Penaranda emerged victorious. Which marks the first time a jump rope performer triumphed and then did a routine onstage as part of their celebration.

Everyone involved wished only that The Creator, who died in 2022 at age 60, were around to see this. Brake considered the first episode of Yu-Gi-Oh!. It centered on the spiky-haired hero he had spied on that first pack; a spiky-haired child who would break down barriers and bring people together through the power of friendship.

How the character did that tied everything together, from Lyles and the other athletes to another world championships that unspooled like a sporting event. The main character in that long-ago story overcame everything in front of him with … Exodia.