BUDAPEST — 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.
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Lyles, 26, went into worlds 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 with 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.
Brauman noted the extreme heat all week.
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 Sports’ Lewis Johnson. “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 championships back then.”
Lyles became the first man to win the sprint double at worlds 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).
Then he’s off to race a 200m at a Diamond League meet in Zurich, Switzerland, next Thursday. He also wants to race another 100m this season and is undecided whether to race the Diamond League Final in Eugene, Oregon, on Sept. 16-17.
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.”
Speaking 14 hours after the race, Lyles was asked if he’d change anything about his preparation to handle the schedule come the Olympics, should he make the team in both events.
“Sleep,” he said at the hospitality area for his apparel sponsor, Adidas. “As I went into the 200m yesterday, all my body wanted to do was sleep all day. It was just sleeping, sleeping, sleeping, even as I got to the track. My body was just like falling asleep on the table as I had my PT working on me. … When it was time to wake up [after a “power nap”] and get that energy in, the body started reacting, and it was reacting very well. But I can only imagine how much better the race could have been if I was able to get more sleep on top of that.”
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 “kind of struggling a little bit with a sinus infection” 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 Jackson saying 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.
Venezuelan Yulimar Rojas won a fourth consecutive world title in the triple jump, pulling it out on her final jump to move up from eighth place.
Rojas, undefeated since her Tokyo Olympic title, avoided elimination after four of six jumps by a tiebreaker.
Rojas’ 15.08-meter jump denied Ukrainian Maryna-Bekh Romanchuk from winning her nation’s first world outdoor title in any event since 2013.
Haruka Kitaguchi won the javelin on her final throw to become the first Japanese woman to win a world title in any event since Hiromi Suzuki in the marathon in 1997.
Worlds continue Saturday, live on CNBC, NBCSports.com, the NBC Sports app and Peacock, featuring the 5000m, where Kenyan Faith Kipyegon bids to become the first woman to sweep the 1500m and 5000m at one worlds.
