Budapest 2023: Lyles misses Bolt's record but bank 200m title, Jackson beats Richardson.
Budapest 2023: Lyles misses Bolt record but bank 200m title, Jackson beats Richardson
As Noah Lyles went off to race the world championships 200m final, his coach, Lance Brauman, had some parting words.
“Next time I see you, you’re going to be a three-time 200m world champion,” Brauman said.
Lyles smiled.
He proved Brauman right later Friday night. Lyles pulled away coming off the curve, clocked 19.52 seconds,
and won by 23 hundredths over 19-year-old American Erriyon Knighton. Botswana’s Letsile Tebogo, also 20, followed his 100m silver with 200m bronze.
Lyles, 26, went into the world believing he could break Usain Bolt’s world record of 19.19. A year ago, he won the 200m in 19.31, breaking Michael Johnson’s American record and becoming the third-fastest man in history.
“Of course, I wanted to be faster. I at least wanted to break the American record again,” Lyles said. “I still believe I have the ability to. It’s just after my sixth race and still running 19.5, I can’t be sad about that.”
Lyles put things in perspective. This was his first time running both the 100m and 200m at a global championship, making it six races in seven days.
Lyles also flashed back to the Olympics — where he went in as the favorite and ran 19.74 for bronze.
“After what happened in Tokyo, I said that I don’t believe in deserving to win anymore,” he told NBC.
“You take the win. Today I had to take that win again. Just because I won it two years in a row does not mean that it belongs to me.”
Lyles also brought up his first world championships in 2019, when he prevailed in 19.83.
“I couldn’t watch that race for months because I felt so disappointed in myself [for the time],” he said. “But after years, I look back at that race, and I’d be like, wow, I actually did that. I did it young, and I was going up against great fields. It was a hard world championship back then.”
Lyles became the first man to win the sprint double in the world since Bolt in 2015. On Saturday, he is expected to be on the U.S. men’s 4x100m relay, bidding to match Bolt’s triple gold feat from those 2015 Worlds (and 2013 and 2009).
Eventually, he and Brauman will return to Clermont, Florida. They will reflect on the season, particularly how well his training cycles prepared him for the sprint double, which he hopes to repeat in Paris.
“We hit it right at the right time,” said Brauman, who previously coached 100m-200m stars Veronica Campbell-Brown, Tyson Gay, and Tori Bowie. “We’ll look at the program, see if there’s anything you want to tweak, but as of right now, I mean, that plan came together nicely.”
Also Friday, Jamaican Shericka Jackson repeated as women’s 200m champion, this time in 21.41 seconds, the second-fastest in history. Jackson, 29, was primarily a 400m sprinter until 2021.
Only Florence Griffith-Joyner’s world record of 21.34 from 1988 is faster (with 1.2 meters/second more tailwind than Jackson had). Jackson won last year’s title in 21.45, which was at the time No. 2 in history.
Jackson later said that 1) she was feeling “kind of under the weather” for Friday’s final and 2) she wrote two times on her bib beforehand: 21.40 and a faster time that she declined to disclose in a press conference. However, a World Athletics-provided quote attributed to Jackson said that it was “21.2 something.”
“Once I execute a good race, I definitely will get there,” to the world record, Jackson said.
Americans Gabby Thomas and Sha’Carri Richardson took silver (21.81) and bronze (21.92).
Thomas, the Olympic bronze medalist, had watched last year’s world 200m final inside Hayward Field. She missed the team in the event due to a grade-two hamstring tear 12 days before the USA Track and Field Outdoor Championships.
Richardson, this week’s 100m gold medalist, became the first American woman to win 100m and 200m medals at the same worlds since Carmelita Jeter in 2011. Richardson ran the fastest times of her life in both finals.
