The world’s fastest man won’t race against the NFL’s fastest player.
The race between Olympic gold medalist Noah Lyles and NFL star Tyreek Hill won’t take place this summer. Speaking Monday at an event in Cannes, France, Lyles said they were supposed to race this coming weekend in New York City, but it fell through.
“We were very deep into creating the event,” Lyles said. “In fact, it was supposed to happen this weekend,” Lyles said. “Unfortunately there were some things, complications, personal reasons that it just didn’t come to pass, but we were full on.
“We were gonna have a big event, we were going to shut down New York Times Square and everything, we were gonna have all the billboards for the event, it was going to be a lot of fun.”
In February, the two athletes agreed to race after months of trash-talking with the plan to do so before July, when Lyles competes in the U.S. championships and Hill heads to NFL training camp.
The race’s distance and possible broadcast situation were never addressed, nor was the exact reason it was called off.
In April, two months after Lyles and Hill agreed to race, police were called after an incident between Hill and his ex-wife, though no charges were ultimately filed. The Dolphins wideout has an extensive legal history; he was convicted of domestic assault in 2015 and was investigated for child abuse in 2019.
The 31-year-old is considered one of the fastest players in the NFL and has a track background. At Oklahoma State, Hill had personal bests of 6.61 seconds for the 60-meter dash, 10.19 seconds in the 100 meters, and 20.14 seconds in the 200. He set indoor school records in the 60-meter dash with 6.64 seconds and the 200-meter dash with 20.57 seconds, but those times were posted back in 2014 and earlier. Hill had been away from the track for a long time, and his return with a 60-meter race in 2023 was middling at best.
That made his 100-meter performance Friday truly stunning. He ran 10.15 at the Last Chance Sprint Series in Sherman Oaks, Calif.—well behind Lyles’s standard but very fast for someone with a day job.
Only 32 Americans have run faster than Hill this year, with four tying his time, raising the fringe possibility that Hill could qualify for the U.S. championships later this summer. The USATF qualifying standard is 10.05 seconds, but the field is sometimes filled to 32 sprinters.
For context, Hill’s time on Friday would have made him the final semifinal qualifier for the 100-meter dash at the 2024 Paris Olympics, which Lyles ultimately won in 9.87 seconds. Nigeria’s Favour Ashe was the final sprinter to qualify with 10.16 seconds.
After the race he held up a sign that said, “Noah could never.” Hill continued his trash talking on Wednesday, posting on X/Twitter a Photoshopped version of the popular GIF of Homer Simpson disappearing into the shrubs.
“.@LylesNoah after seeing me run the 100m last weekend,” Hill posted.
Lyles, an American sprinter, regularly competes in the 60-meter, 100-meter, and 200-meter dash. He won gold in the 100-meter dash at the 2024 Paris Olympics in 9.87 seconds to give him the title of fastest man in the world. His personal best in the event is 9.83 seconds, roughly three-tenths of a second faster than Hill. Though Hill’s 10.15 is shocking, Lyles has not run that slowly in years. Lyles has run 22 100-meter races in the last two years, and every one of them in 10.05 seconds or faster. The only time in the last four years that he ran slower than 10.15 was into a major headwind in Bermuda in 2022.
