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Noah Lyles and NFL star Tyreek Hill have finally agreed to race each other after years of back-and-forth banter about who is faster.
Lyles—the reigning 100-meter Olympic champion and the American record holder in the 200 meters—will line up against Hill, an All-Pro wide receiver for the Miami Dolphins who was one of the top sprinters in the country during high school.
The details are fuzzy: Both athletes spoke to People to reveal the news, but there’s no decision on the race distance or location, and the only timeline is “sometime this spring or summer before Lyles competes in the U.S. Championships this July.”
Last October, Ad Age announced that Lyles and Hill would face off in 2025 in a race put on by Super Serious, a creative agency co-founded by actor Terry Crews. The company is the production partner for Duael—a new head-to-head racing circuit that promises impressive prize money, which Lyles is signed to. Again, details were sparse.
But the details don’t really matter. Barring some kind of handicap for Hill, Lyles should win, no matter the distance. Track fans know this. There’s a difference between being one of the fastest athletes in football—a sport where speed is certainly an element— and track, where speed is the only element.
To Hill’s credit, he has track pedigree. During his senior year of high school in 2013, he ran 10.19 in the 100 meters and 20.14 in the 200—the second-fastest high school time ever. He medaled at the World Junior Championships and was an All-American during indoor track his freshman year at Oklahoma State. His last race, however, was 11 years ago. It’s been a while.
That’s why Lyles is making a mistake by agreeing to race. He has everything to lose.
Here are a few scenarios of what could happen and what the response from the sports world would be.
Lyles wins comfortably: “Of course he won. He’s the Olympic champion. It would have been embarrassing if he didn’t.”
Lyles wins, but the race is close: “How does Noah almost get beat by someone who doesn’t even run track?”
Hill wins, by any amount: “Noah is a fraud. Track runners aren’t real athletes.”
I’m confident in these reactions because, well, we’ve already seen a similar thing play out when Lyles raced the mega-popular YouTuber, IShowSpeed, in November.
Lyles and “Speed” raced over 50 meters at an unofficial exhibition hosted by MrBeast. The race started out close, then Lyles pulled ahead, playfully taunting Speed in the final meters. But here’s the problem. To the naked eye (i.e., to many of the millions of people who watched the video) the race looked pretty close. Track fans knew Noah had it in the bag, but Speed wasn’t far behind.