POLAND:

Despite an injury-induced delay to the start of his season, Olympic 100 metres champion Noah Lyles reckons his form is as good as — if not better than — last summer when he claimed gold in Paris.

Lyles won a thrilling race at the Stade de France just over a year ago by the narrowest of margins and went on to claim bronze in the 200m when suffering from Covid.

For the first time since that Olympic 100m final, the self-proclaimed showman will on Saturday come face to face with Kishane Thompson, the 24-year-old Jamaican he pipped by just five-thousandths of a second in Paris.

“The 100m is obviously the glory race, it’s obviously the one that gets you the most attention,” Lyles said on Friday ahead of the Silesia Diamond League meet in the Polish city of Chorzow.

“I can say that if I’d won the 200m and lost the 100 it wouldn’t have hit the same going back to the US for sure and probably even in the world it’d be a lot different.”

Lyles played down the fact that he had not met Thompson since that balmy night in the French capital.

“Personally, I wanted to just do a one-on-one race in Jamaica,” he said. “I thought that would have just been amazing, me and Kishane right next to each other, lane by lane, just us two duking it out.

“I feel like we could have sold out the crowd for sure, I thought that would have been a lot of fun.”

Instead, the duo will face off in Poland with Lyles describing his run-in to the September 13-21 world championships in Tokyo as “the most important races of the year”.

“These are the biggest competitions, at high levels. This is literally prepping myself to say, ‘This is what it’s going to be like, if not more intense, as I get closer to Tokyo’.

“I need to get in that frame of mind. So I need to be in those situations.”

Lyles said he was rounding into form: “The results I’ve seen in practice have shown that I’m exactly where I was last year, or heading in the same direction as I was last year, if not better.”

The 28-year-old American predicted a fast race on Saturday, with a quartet of tried and tested US teammates in the shape of Kenny Bednarek, Christian Coleman, Lindsey Courtney and Trayvon Bromell, as well as South African Akani Simbine in the field.

“You basically have the Olympic final maybe missing two people, but adding in some just-as-fast people,” Lyles said.

“Having Kishane there makes it even better. It’s going to be a moment that everyone’s looking at their calendar, saying ‘OK this is what I’m basing my world championships picks off’.”

Lyles, however, was in no doubt about who was the biggest draw.

“I’m going to just put it like this: there are definitely races that have Noah and there are races that don’t have Noah and I’ve watched the numbers for races that don’t have me and they don’t do very well,” he said.

“You watch the races with me and you’re like, ‘Oh wow yeah there’s a lot more viewership’. I’m not saying I’m the face of the sport, I’m just saying that there’s a lot more interest when I run it.

“A showman, a rock star, yes that’s a very good way to describe how I like to view myself when I go into a track meet and how I want to interact with the crowd.”