admin Well done. Tell me about the nails.
I’ve kind of wanted to do designs with my nails for a long time, but I’ve never really got into it. Finally, my girlfriend was like: You just need to do it for Worlds. I show up at Planet Smoothie and the lady who’s getting us our drinks has these amazing nails. I’m like, where did your nails? And she gives me her contact. This person is so booked that it took me a month before we could even get on the list. We finally get on, I walk in, it is this little girl. I said, “How old are you?” She said, “Well, I’ll be 16 next week.” (Laughs) And she just started going at it.
I love it. You said this was new for you, your girlfriend talked you into it. Tell me about the masculinity angle of it. For people of your generation is that not really a consideration?
That’s not that influential. The two people who made me want to get into it were Jaden Smith and Tyler, the Creator. I’ve seen both of them paint their nails. And, like, bro, I can think of like some amazing outfits that just having that extra oomph of colored nails to go with, would just make everything complete.
I like to do special intros and outros at my track meets, and I was just like, imagine all the intros I could do with nails. You know, as the camera’s coming around, they’re like, dang, this man must be hard. But, like, you better win though! It’s all that entertainment type vibe that gets people excited.
Next year is the Olympics, and whether it’s fair or not, it’s only every four years when all eyes are on these global sports. What is this year going to be like for you? I hate to say this, but the double in the World Championships means something different than the double in the Olympics.
Oh, it’s completely different. Every four years, this is the year and you gotta take advantage of it. Last Olympics I took advantage of it by trying to gain as many Olympic sponsors as possible so that everybody saw, you know, who I was. I feel like it did a good job. It wasn’t the Olympics that I wanted. I don’t think it was the Olympics that anybody truly wanted.
No.
But it is what we got. I learned what I wanted to do next time. I said, next Olympics, we’re gonna be choosing probably three—at the most—Olympic sponsors and we’re just gonna go heavy into a bigger project. At the beginning of this year, me and my agent partnered with Comcast, which owns NBC, to help us create a docuseries and put it on Peacock. Untitled: The Noah Lyles Project. The first episode is already out, and the second episode will be coming out on September 14th. But it is basically this whole season: what we had to do to become the double world champion or triple world champion.
