AfterNoah Lyleswon his bronze Olympic medal in the men’s 200m last week, he was emotional.
He said he started — and then stopped —taking anti-depressantsin 2020, which affected his performance,according toTheWashington Post.
“They are very supportive and always looking out for me, even when I don’t see it,” Lyles continues. “And then the second thing is, now I’m a fighter. And that’s how I made it this far, in fact. Just because I’m struggling doesn’t mean that I’m going to quit.”
Lyles, a first-time Olympian, says he’s “very adamant that I don’t believe in really giving up or failing is not succeeding. It’s when you have completely stopped and give it up and not give your all.”
Noah Lyles.Jean Catuffe/Getty Images
“It definitely is a moment where a lot of people can look back and say, ‘Oh, these athletes actually have feelings,’ " Lyles told reporters during the OMEGA chat. “Because I’ve been very vocal of, I’m a human being, I’m not a superhero, I have feelings, I have emotions.”
“Just because I go out there and run fast doesn’t mean that I don’t come home and hurt and get tired and want to go have fun,” he said.
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Athletes, Lyles said, often get put on a “humongous pedestal” when “in all actuality, we all have gifts and abilities, and it’s just we found our ability and we honed it, really worked at it. But anybody can do that. Finding your gift and honing it and putting all into it. You can do that. And of course, sometimes some gifts are praised more than others, but that doesn’t mean it’s less important.”
Noah tells PEOPLE at OMEGA that there’s “not a day” he doesn’t remember Josephus “being there.”
He says, “We’ve been together, forever. And we’ve now grown on this journey of making the Olympic team together. We were planning to go and make it in 2016. I got fourth. Unfortunately, he got injured that year. And then we came into 2021 and he only made to the semifinals.”
“I know that I miss sharing moments with them, especially right now, which is probably one of the bigger moments of my life. And I know they miss me too,” he says. “So it’s definitely something that you want to share a moment like this, have somebody to attach to and be like, ‘We did this. We’ve been through the journey together.’ "
To learn more about Team USA, visitTeamUSA.org. Watch the Tokyo Olympics now on NBC.
source: people.com
