Everything Noah Lyles Has Shared About Having Severe Asthma

Hannah Peters/Getty Images/Amanda K Bailey

When Noah Lyles charged ahead of the pack and crossed the finish line in Sunday’s 100-meter sprint at the Paris Games, pushing ahead of Jamaica’s Kishane Thompson by five-thousandths of a second to lock down the gold, he appeared to be in peak condition. Barely a huff or a puff seemed to escape him. So you might be surprised to learn that the 27-year-old sprinter once struggled to breathe on a daily basis, fighting a severe case of asthma that gave him a barking cough, as Time reported, and even landed him in the hospital multiple times.

It would seem unlikely that he’d wind up taking on a sport like running, one that directly implicates your airways and lung capacity, much less excelling at it to the degree that he has—his first-place finish on Sunday, at 9.817 seconds, makes him the fastest man alive. After all, getting caught in a coughing fit when working out or struggling to catch your breath during or after exercise are common signs of asthma in action.

And yet, while asthma has long raged in Lyles’s body, a passion for speed was also seeded in his genes: As ESPN reported, his dad, Kevin Lyles, won a gold medal in the 4x400 relay at the 1995 World Championships, and his mom, Keisha Caine Bishop, was an all-American sprinter at Seton Hall. Around the age of 11—after years of surgery, different medications, and hospitalizations to manage his symptoms—Lyles took up running, and before long, he was coming out on top at local meets. But the journey since has been anything but effortless.

Read on to learn how Lyles has succeeded against the odds.

What Lyles’s childhood with asthma was like

Lyles’s asthma journey started long before he became one of the fastest humans on the planet. At just 3 years old, the future track star battled a viciously persistent cough. “He couldn’t eat without coughing. He couldn’t play,” Bishop, Lyles’s mother, told ESPN. “His quality of life went down.”

At age 5, doctors told Bishop that her son had reactive airway disease, an unofficial diagnosis that’s used to describe asthma-like breathing issues when an exact cause isn’t known. Lyles’s wheezing would often land him in the emergency room and cause other problems like ear infections because of how weak his immune system was. Doctors eventually ran some extra tests and officially diagnosed him with asthma, according to ESPN. “There wasn’t a time that I can remember when asthma was not an issue,” Lyles said in Netflix’s documentary Sprint. “I can’t remember a lot of nights when I wasn’t at the hospital getting medication to just try and calm down the episodes.”

Lyles soon started a nebulizer treatment—which involves inhaling a medicated mist through a mouthpiece connected to a small machine—as his mother did everything she could to reduce the amount of irritants in their Gainesville, Florida, home—she removed curtains, threw stuffed toys in the trash, and hired an HVAC tech to clean their air ducts, ESPN reported. Around age 7, doctors removed Lyles’s tonsils and adenoids (glands in the upper airway that help trap germs you inhale) to help him breathe better. This was about the time he began to play sports.

Everything was going pretty well up until his sophomore year in high school. Although his condition eased a bit, his lungs struggled to recover after races, according to ESPN. “He would be in bed for two days after a race because it just wiped him out,” Bishop told the outlet. She asked Lyles, “What is it that you want out of life? What is your purpose on this earth?” His answer? “To run really fast.”

How Noah Lyles has dealt with asthma as an elite runner

Even as Lyles advanced in the sport, bypassing college to go pro straight out of high school and eventually becoming a three-time world champion, asthma has remained a constant specter in his life. “Asthma definitely affects kind of everything I do in terms of health, physical fitness, and sometimes even emotional well-being,” he told CNN in 2020. “If you’re emotionally fatigued, that can bring your immune system down.”

Lyles isn’t the only athlete who has dealt with asthma on the road to the Olympics; according to the American Lung Association, asthma is the most common chronic condition among Olympic athletes, affecting stars like former track and field athlete Jackie Joyner-Kersee and current swimmer Ryan Murphy. Research even suggests that the kind of intense training required to reach elite status in a sport may even cause or exacerbate asthma symptoms.

As The Washington Post reported, Lyles also lives with the reality that getting any kind of respiratory virus can kick his asthma symptoms into full gear—something that was particularly tough during the rise of the COVID pandemic. He told The Philadelphia Tribune he took extra precautions to ensure he didn’t catch the virus, like washing his hands regularly and self-isolating.

But the time away from others took a serious toll on his mental health, sending him into a deep depression that would later affect his performance at the Tokyo Games. “I was so tired. All the time,” he told Time. “Even thinking was a drain. It felt like you were almost in a constant asthma attack. You know there’s more room in your lungs, but you can’t physically use the muscles to actually take that breath.”

The Paris Games was an entirely different story, showcasing the athlete at his peak. Shortly after his gold-medal finish in the 100-meter, Lyles took to Twitter to share that, despite his number of health conditions—allergies, dyslexia, attention deficit disorder, anxiety, depression, and asthma—he achieved what he set out to do. “I will tell you that what you have does not define what you can become.”

Although Lyles still faces a lot of unknowns, especially as COVID spreads in the Olympic Village and around the world, he chooses to focus on what he can control: winning. “I try not to worry,” Lyles told The Washington Post. “If you worry, that’s just going to cause more stress. And stress is not fun, and I don’t believe in a life that’s not fun.”

You can catch Lyles next in heats for the 200-meter dash starting on Monday, August 5 at 1:55 p.m. ET. Semifinals for the event will happen on Wednesday at 2:02 p.m. ET, with finals following on Thursday at 2:30 p.m. ET.

SELF is your one-click source for all things Summer Olympics. Read our latest coverage of the Paris Games here.

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