We Have Some Details on Noah Lyles vs Tyreek Hill… and It’s Looking Bad For The Cheetah

Last time we visited this topic, we discussed how racing at anything shorter than an official track and field distance represented a symbolic win for Tyreek Hill in his long-debated, recently-agreed-upon showdown with Noah Lyles.

Hill gets his doors blown off at any distance beyond 20 metres, but the shorter the race, the smaller the margin of victory for Lyles. If Lyles wins a 40-yard dash by a 10th of a second, Hill can say he barely lost, which, in his world, is the same as nearly winning. A defeat by the numbers, but a PR victory for a guy claiming his NFL accolades make him a top-tier elite sprinter.

Well, now we have some details.

In a recent interview with @_RealTaklWithTee, Lyles revealed that he and Hill have come to terms on a 60-metre race, complete with starting blocks and electronic timing, which is to so say he’s leaving Hill zero wiggle room. So, for the second and far from final time, a warning for my friends who are about to view this match race through the prism of their NFL fandom — Lyles will do to Hill what the Eagles did to the Chiefs in the Super Bowl.

Probably worse.

NFL fans will ask how I can be so sure.

Track fans already know.

It’s right there in the numbers.

Tyreek has never run faster than 6.64 seconds in the 60 metres. Lyles hasn’t run that slow since high school. If Tyreek can equal a 10-year-old PB, that’s a win for him, and an objectively massive achievement after nearly a decade in the NFL. It just won’t bring him within sniffing distance of the most recent Olympic 100-metre champion, and the guy who won 60 metre silver at World Indoors last year.

Hill, we know now, is not above audacious feats of speed that pivot on what his target audience doesn’t know. A couple of weeks back he posted a video to YouTube that claimed to show him breaking the world record for circling the basepaths on a baseball diamond. Guinness says the official mark is 13.3 seconds. Hill’s video shows him running 12.06 on his friend’s stopwatch, and internet sleuths were able to revise that time down 10.45.

But you know what else the internet sleuths could do? Confirm what the eye test revealed to anybody who has spent time at baseball stadiums.

On a regulation baseball field built for adults, the distance between bases is 90 feet. Hill ran on a softball field, where the bases are significantly less than 90 feet apart. Our man at Total Running Productions measured it at roughly 65 feet, which means Hill’s 10.45-second lap, while still blazing fast, is a lot less impressive, and certainly not a world record worth commemorating.

But when he lines up against Lyles for that 60 metre dash, we won’t need calculators or Google Maps to help us measure the distance between them. The stopwatch has already done it for us. Peak Tyreek runs 6.64. Lyles, at his best, runs 6.43. The difference isn’t rounding error. It’s an order of magnitude.

Lyles knows that.

So does Tyreek, no matter how he might grandstand between now and then.

And now, so do you.

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