Sprinter Noah Lyles mocked U.S. sports after claiming the 200-meter sprint double at the World Athletics Championships in Hungary on Friday night.
The 26-year-old Gainesville, Fla., native came away with a 19.52-second victory in the 200-meter race to add to his previous weekend’s 100-meter victory.
He was the first American male to complete the 100-200 sprint double since 2007, when Tyson Gay completed the feat.
After his historic win, his third consecutive in the 200-meter race, he commented on the state of American sports champions.
“I have to watch the NBA Finals and they have world champion on their heads,” Lyles said, according to the Daily Mail. “World champion of what? The United States? Don’t get me wrong. I love the U.S. at times. But that ain’t the world.”
“We are the world. We have almost every country out here fighting and thriving and putting on a flag to show that they are represented. There ain’t no flags in the NBA,” he added.
As for himself, Lyles says he has the desire to “transcend” the sport of running, and he is making efforts by partaking in a Netflix series about the world of sprinting.
But the streaming service’s show didn’t latch onto him from the beginning.
“All I know is they weren’t talking about me at the beginning of that documentary,” Lyles said, according to the Daily Mail. “As soon as I won in Paris they got buddy buddy real quick. I think it went from being a docuseries about the fastest people and then it turned into a docuseries about me.”
“I want people to say ‘Wow, this isn’t just a fast guy, he´s a well-rounded guy with a good personality, and I want to follow him for that,’” he said.
As for his own history, Lyles was excited to have made an impact on U.S. sprinting.
“It’s a great feeling to know that I’ve just done something that not a lot of people have done,” Lyles told NBC following the 200 meters. “[Friday], I came out and showed that I’m different from everybody else. I’m a double champion.”
But the championships didn’t come without incident, as a cart carrying racers, including Lyles, collided with another cart before the semifinal heat took place earlier this week.
The incident sent pieces of glass into the right eye of Jamaican sprinter Andrew Hudson, who still ran the race and said he “did the best” he could do under the circumstances, per the Associated Press.
“Survived a crash and still got the fastest time going into the final,” Lyles said on Instagram after the semifinal. “Thank you God for watching over me.”
The now three-time 200-meter world champion is still after Usain Bolt’s world record of 19.19 seconds.
Bolt, fittingly, was the last male to complete the world championships double, doing so in 2015.
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