Before lining up for his opening 100m heat in June’s US Olympic trials, Noah Lyles made sure to milk his closeup on TV. But rather than pound his chest or point skyward or make some other peacock display of masculinity, the American sprinter did about the dorkiest thing possible: he pulled out a Blue-Eyes White Dragon Yu-Gi-Oh! card.

For the uninitiated: Yu-Gi-Oh! is a manga series that launched at the turn of the century, and, like Pokémon, it spawned a trading card game. A symbol of near invincibility, the Blue-Eyes White Dragon is an ace in the hole that goes for big money on the collectors’ market. By playing his top trump, and so early in trials, Lyles didn’t just move the Yu-Gi-Oh! card market; he shouted to classic gamers the world over: I’m one of you. “My Yu-Gi-Oh loving kid went crazy when he saw this and knew exactly what card Lyles flashed!” wrote one X user. Added another: “Bro hella corny, but Blue-Eyes White Dragon is automatic respect.”

The 27-year-old Floridian has a knack for stealing focus. In Netflix’s track and field docuseries Sprint, Lyles likens himself to an artistic director, as well known for his theatrical introductions as he is for his Lewis Hamilton-like catwalks to the track. In between, Lyles has emerged as a generational sprinter who gives the US a chance of reclaiming the track glory that crumbled in the era of Usain Bolt, Lyles’s idol. There are streaks of Bolt in Lyles, a six-time world champion who closed out his US Olympic trials by clocking a personal best in the 100m and breaking Michael Johnson’s 28-year-old American record in the 200m.

Lyles aims to leave Paris with Bolt’s longstanding world records in the 100m and 200m, too. Altogether, he’s targeting four golds from these Games – in the 100m, 200m, and the 4x100m and 4x400m relays. In a June appearance on the Tonight Show, Lyles showed how keen he is to pass Bolt. “It’s not just good enough to be faster than that, you also have to have the medals to go with it,” he said. “OK, he’s won three [golds at a single Olympics], and he has the world records … what do you gotta do to be better than that? You gotta get four. Nobody’s done four.”

The bigger Lyles talks, the more longtime track watchers say, slow down; that’s too much pressure. There’s no question Lyles – the product of two excellent college athletes – whose younger brother, Josephus, is also a world-class sprinter, projects as a future track immortal. It’s that the hype appears to have reduced Lyles to yet another arrogant American stereotype. In another scene from Netflix’s Sprint, Lyles explains that being a successful athlete requires “the mindset of a god”.

In an interview after his sprint sweeps at the 2023 World Athletics Championships, which took place around the same time the Denver Nuggets won their first NBA title, Lyles bristled at the notion of any basketball player considering him, a freshly minted treble gold medallist, a peer. “World champion of what?” he scoffed referring to the NBA winners. “The United States?” The NBA stars Kevin Durant and Devin Booker led the pushback on social media, while a few voices such as the sports journalist Gary Al-Smith defended Lyles’s comments as an observation on American exceptionalism – an irony that obviously escaped the sprinter.

But for hardcore track fans who take Lyles’s talent seriously, his worst offense by far is his insistence on referring to himself as the world’s fastest man. That’s despite Bolt still being very much alive, and Kishane Thompson, a 23-year-old Jamaican, easing to the fastest 100m time in two years in June at Jamaica’s Olympic trials. “My coach instructed me to just run the first 60, nothing more,” Thompson deadpanned afterward. For a sprinter who’s not widely known for playing cards, Thompson has a great poker face. “[Thompson] hasn’t shown his full potential yet,” The 2004 Olympic champion Justin Gatlin said on a podcast recently, “and that’s scary to me.”

But Lyles has mostly shrugged off Thompson. “I beat everyone that I touch,” he said after the Jamaican shaved four one-hundredths off Lyles’s world-leading time. The escalating tensions have heated up the rivalry between the US and Jamaican men’s sprinters to an unprecedented degree – with Lyles pouring more gasoline on the fire by insinuating his Jamaican girlfriend, the Tokyo Olympics bronze medal-winning sprinter Junelle Bromfield, fed him information on Thompson’s training camp. The higher Lyles ratchets up the pressure, the more it appears to weigh on him.

After taking bronze in the 200m at the Tokyo Games, Lyles opened up about his lifelong battle with anxiety and depression. He said the medication he uses to manage his mental health causes weight-gain that trims his speed, forcing him to abandon his meds before big competitions. Recalling his experiences on the starting blocks in Tokyo, Lyles said that he would tell himself “it’s showtime” in the hope of getting his energy up, but think “this is not cool, this is not fun”. When his brother, Josephus, failed to make the Olympics that same year, Noah cried.

The dark time prompted Lyles to hire a sports therapist, an “every day” therapist and a third counsellor who specialises in grief. (Bromfield, his girlfriend, considered walking away from track after her mother died of cervical cancer in 2021.) And while Lyles credited the clinical work for helping him overcome his inner critic on the way to taking a silver medal in the 60m at the 2024 world indoor championships, he has confronted new challenges in Paris – where his popularity in the Olympic Village has come as something of a surprise. “Even though we might be superstars in your eyes, we still are human beings and we do want to be able to have our space and our time,” he told reporters earlier this week. “I want to be able to enjoy the Olympics just like you guys are.”

Many great athletes walk a line between thinking they’re invincible and knowing they’re human – and it’s often the strongest who are willing to admit they are vulnerable. Even as he edges from supreme confidence to quieter self-reflection, Lyles reminds the world that self-discovery is the real prize in every hero quest.