Noah Lyles paid off: after becoming 100m world champion on Sunday, the American retained world 200m gold to become the first to achieve a double at worlds since Jamaican legend Usain Bolt in 2015 on Friday in Budapest.
Lyles (26) won in 19 sec 52, ahead of another American, young Erriyon Knighton (19.75), and young Batswana Letsile Tebogo (19.81), already on the 100m podium on Sunday.
With this double, and a third consecutive coronation in the 200m, Lyles asserts himself a little more as one of the faces of world athletics, one year from the 2024 Olympics in Paris.
The U-turn is definitely his preserve, his territory: the American is also the third fastest man in history there (19.31 in 2022), has not bowed since the 2021 Olympic final (3rd ) and completed it in under twenty seconds more often than Bolt.
In total, adding the men’s 4x100m relay gold shared in 2019, this is the fifth world title of his career.
In the 100m final on Sunday, Lyles had improved his personal best by three hundredths and equaled the best performance in the world of the season to win ahead of Tebogo and the Briton Zharnel Hughes, both credited with a time of 9 sec 88 and decided to the thousandth of a second.
Tebogo, double world junior 100m champion (2021 and 2022) and promise of world athletics, then became the first African sprinter to secure a place on the men’s 100m world podium in history, at twenty years.
Knighton (19) continues to progress, a year after winning the world bronze medal in the 200m.
