Team USA's fastest man Noah Lyles reveals his secret sauce behind the scenes

The fastest man in the world is ready to race for the gold, thanks to help from therapists, nutritionists, and energetic playlists.

Noah Lyles for Tide's 'Stains Happen To The Best Of Us' 2024 Paris Olympic Games campaign / Tide

This Olympic season, all eyes are on Noah Lyles.

Nearly a year after earning the title of fastest man in the world at the 2023 World Athletics Championships, Lyles is representing Team USA in track and field at the 2024 Paris Olympic Games. Later this week, Lyles will compete in the Men's 100 meter and Men's 200 meter sprints, in hopes to earn the gold.

The 2024 Games are Lyles’ second Olympics — his first was in the 2020 Tokyo Games held in 2021, where he earned the bronze medal in the 200 meter sprint. Upon his return to the Olympics, Lyles is optimistic about the days ahead. We chat with Lyles via Zoom from the Olympic village on an evening when he is feeling “blessed and highly favored.”

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While he waits for his moment of truth — the Men’s Track and Field events — Lyles has been cheering on his fellow Team USA members who are competing in other sports.

“I just like watching different sports,” says Lyles, “having those community centers. where they have a bunch of TVs to watch all the sports — that’s where I’ve been relaxing.”

Lyles is sure to see himself pop up on TV while he watches the Games. Ahead of the Olympics, Lyles received a shoutout from Sabrina Carpenter in a promo for the Olympics. A highlight clip of Lyles also played in Beyoncé’s Team USA introduction, in which she said, “You gotta love Noah and Sha’Carri.” But in a TV spot for Tide, Lyles is the star of the detergent’s Stains Happen to the Best of Us campaign, in which he is featured alongside nine-time track and field gold medalist, Carl Lewis. 

In the commercial, Lyles eats pasta and gets sauce on his jacket, and then says “I bet Carl Lewis doesn’t get tomato sauce on his jacket,” before cutting to a clip of Lewis spilling ice cream on his shirt. Lyles then washes his clothes with Tide, making the garments as good as new.

“I got a call from my agent, and he explained to me the idea and the concept for what Tide wanted to do,” recalls Lyles. “They said they wanted to get Carl Lewis involved and tie the generations together, and I loved that theme. And of course, you know, my mom was like ‘you  need to do it!’ because she wanted all the Tide. And I'm like, ‘well, I do got a lot of laundry to do.’ You know, running outside, you definitely get quite a few stains from the track, so it was easily a no-brainer.”

Though he’s eating pasta in the Tide spot, one may be surprise that most of Lyles’ plates contain “very little carbs.” While he’s been training, Lyles has worked with a chef and a nutritionist to curate meals for him to help him get into ideal performance mode. He notes that focus more on “greens and vegetables,” as well as “proteins to build the muscles back up.”

Going into the Olympics, the pressure is always high — even for the fastest man in the world. But for the second time, Lyles is more confident than ever. 

Having long been open about his mental health struggles and his therapy journey, Lyles says that training his mind was equally as important as training his body.

“There was just so much going on [in 2021],” says Lyles. “I was coming offof antidepressants, I was not running the fastest that I've run in previous years, and I hadn't seen the progression that I wanted to see. Sometimes you have this vision that you want to come true so badly, and when it’s not going according to plan, you almost start to self-destruct. And having those moments, it's like, ‘Okay, I'm not going to let a moment like that happen again.’ I’m not saying that I'm going to try to control it, it's just, I'm going to be a lot more self-aware, and be very proactive to the situation rather than reactive. That's how I've gone into this Olympics — and to be honest, these last three years leading up to this, knowing that every year I was creating a new blueprint for how I wanted the Olympics to look.”

Lyles knows he can do a 200m sprint in his sleep. But nailing the timing for a 100m sprint was a challenge for him. To train for the 2024 Games, Lyles spent much time honing in on the shorter distances, making sure he can nail the intricate benchmarks, as well as the further distances.

“I was purely a 200-meter runner,” says Lyles. “Of course, I was winning quite a bit of 100 meters, but never to the level that I had been in the last two years. It's involved a lot more top-end work — a lot of sprinting, a lot of jumping into uncomfortable scenarios. Anybody who knows me in track and field will say I do not have the best for 60m. So what did I do? I started running more 60m, so much that I got silver medal at World Championships Indoor, and that's a huge achievement for our guy who's supposed to be known as a 200-meter runner. Then we said ‘Okay, we're gonna start running more hundreds,’ then we start running more hundreds, and I became a world champion. These are all blueprint benchmarks, and I said, ‘These are the things that I want to accomplish before we go into the Olympics.’”

In the three years since the Tokyo Games, Lyles has spent much of his time in the gym and on the track, training for a triumphant return. And the one accessory he can’t workout without? Music.

Lyles doesn’t suggest any brand loyalty to any major headphone or speaker manufacturer, just whatever gets him tuned in. “If I don't have some way to listen to music, I'm gonna be a little bummed out. I'm gonna be more bummed out than if I left my Spikes.”

On the track, he listens to an eclectic mix comprised Jay-Z, Kanye West, J. Cole, Queen, Fred Hammond, and Kirk Franklin. He turns up the heat in the gym and weight room with what he describes as more “aggressive rap,” with artists like Pop Smoke and Youngboy Never Broke Again. “Sometimes, I don't even have to think about my warm-up, because the songs already telling me what exercise I should be doing.”

As Lyles is on his way to the gold, he maintains a degree of confidence, but remains strategic in his approach. But the past three years have led up to the moment he and his supporters have all been waiting for.

It takes a village to raise a champion — therapists, nutritionists, chefs, and the artists who have set the vibe for Lyles to get in the game. But rest assured, Lyles is back — and better than ever before.

“We've definitely increased the weight room dramatically this year, as opposed to my last three years,” says Lyles. “I've gained probably 10 pounds in weight, all muscle, because we constantly check my body fat, and it's still the same that it's been in the last three-to-eight years, truly. That muscle gain has been able to help my start, it's been able to help my 100 meters and of course, help me just be a more powerful athlete.”

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