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≡ THE BIG PICTURE ≡
Olympic men’s 100 m gold medalist and 100-200 m World Champion Noah Lyles told the Nightcap podcast with Shannon Sharpe and Chad Johnson that track and field, as a sport in the U.S., is not ready to be popular.
Appearing for almost an hour on Saturday’s show, Lyles laid it out with clarity:
“The hardest pill is going to be for us to swallow as a sport [is this].
“SPRINT just came out [on Netflix]. It is successful around the world. It is successful in the U.S. They’re about to come out with another season. It’s going to be great. The hard part is that we as a sport are not ready for the popularity that is going to come.
“Everybody is going to say, ‘I want to be a track and field fan!’ ‘I want to follow Fred [Kerley]!’ ‘I want to follow Noah!’ ‘I want to follow Erriyon [Knighton]!’ Guess what? We don’t even have a place to tell them to go to watch the track meet.
“Because it’s in every other different country, a different place [each time]. And you got to get a VPN [Virtual Private Network to see it]. And you got to find your own Web site. You have to go on these back-alley places to just watch regular TV in a different language. We, ourselves, are not ready, infrastructurally-wise to say, ‘Hey world! Come on, we’ve got something amazing for you.’ And that’s the hard part.
“The rights for the Diamond League just got dropped by NBC and moved to Flotrack. Now we’re putting it behind a paywall and making it even harder for fans to become new fans. It hurts because I knew this was going to happen.
“I knew that SPRINT was going to be successful because we have great athletes and great stories. The second part, we are not ready for it yet. We need to get ready and we need to do it fast because it’s coming to L.A.”
Sharpe asked whether Lyles has had discussions with Michael Johnson about his new Grand Slam Track project, to debut in 2025. Answer:
“I’ve been in talks between me, Michael and my agent. We’ve been in talks since the day I heard about it. Trying to get as much information. Trying to get as much of a feel for what’s going on. There’s a lot that I like that he’s doing. There’s a few things that I think could be a little better.
“But the thing that’s stopping me at the heart of it is I have yet to hear a TV provider. Again, what good is it if we’re producing these great times, these great shows, these great rivalries and we have nobody seeing it. Now we’re in the same problem we’re with the Diamond Leagues and World Championships. I need to hear a TV provider and I need to know that it’s going to be able to be seen consistently.”
There’s lots more from Lyles about Paris, about the 100 m, Covid, the relays and so on. Sharpe and Johnson also have members of the men’s winning 4×400 m team as well, before they get back to football.
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