By David Melly
July 31, 2024
As the summer track season continues and Paris Olympics approached, denizens of the track and field Twitterverse have been consumed by one central debate: the fight over appropriate usage of the term “World’s Fastest Man.”
As best we can tell, the latest round of online fighting can be traced back to Noah Lyles’s appearance on The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon, where the reigning 100m World champion was promoted as the “fastest man in the world” – a claim he repeated on the air. This claim, combined with Vogue Magazine’s promotion of Sha’Carri Richardson as the fastest woman in the world, rankled some hardcore track and field fans – especially those who love Jamaican stars like Usain Bolt and Elaine Thompson-Herah. There’s been a lot of hair-splitting over who deserves the title – is it the 2024 world leader? The reigning global champion? The world record holder? Also, why is it the 100 meters versus any other event?
The Lap Count is here to settle things once and for all: It doesn’t freaking matter. “World’s fastest” may look splashy on a magazine cover or talk show ad, but it’s a meaningless title within the context of the sport and track and field fans – casual or hardcore – aren’t doing the sport any favors by taking it seriously. Debates over athletic greatness are central to being a sports fan: Is LeBron or Jordan the true GOAT? Is Shohei Ohtani better than Babe Ruth? Are Serena Williams’s 23 Grand Slam titles the greatest athletic accomplishment in any sport? But fighting over terminology is a waste of everyone’s time.
The goal of anyone looking to elevate the status of track and field in the eyes of the general public should be to help the world understand what accomplishment in our sport really means. Noah Lyles hasn’t lost a 200m since 2021 – that’s a streak that, if the average sports fan understood, should be mind-boggling. Shelly-Ann Fraser-Pryce has 9 of the 22 sub-10.7s ever run. Usain Bolt is the only man in history to win Olympic triple-double gold. These are all real measures of “fastest” that can engage and excite track fans, old and new. What’s not going to get the job done is engaging with every bit of track and field-related bluster with a “well actually!”
A little context can go a long way, and if there’s one thing watching the pommel horse or the canoe slalom every four years reminds us, it’s that the barrier to caring about a new sport is way lower than we pretend it is. We don’t need gimmicks to get people to care about Noah Lyles – and online fighting over minutia certainly doesn’t make our fan community look like a fun one to join. We just need a little faith that track and field, when presented properly, can sell itself.
David Melly
David began contributing to CITIUS in 2018, and quickly cemented himself as an integral part of the team thanks to his quick wit, hot takes, undying love for the sport and willingness to get yelled at online.
