The American men’s hoops team won their fifth consecutive gold medal and one of the first things on USA Basketball’s mind appeared to be a return jab at sprinter Noah Lyles’ past comments.
The 100-meter gold medalist famously said a year ago that being NBA Champions doesn’t mean you are “world champions.”
And Team USA made sure they called themselves “World Champions” in a post from their official account on X after holding off France for an Olympic championship on Saturday — even if technically, Lyles’ original point — while delivered with little regard — wasn’t wrong.
“I have to watch the NBA Finals and they have world champion on their heads,” Lyles said last August, according to the Daily Mail. “World champion of what? The United States? Don’t get me wrong. I love the U.S. at times. But that ain’t the world.”
“We are the world. We have almost every country out here fighting and thriving and putting on a flag to show that they are represented. There ain’t no flags in the NBA,” he added.
Team USA won the FIBA World Championships in 2010 and 2014 but fell to a seventh-place finish in 2019 and was just fourth in 2023 after being the odds-on favorites.
Lyles, during an interview with the AP, was asked about his past comments now that the men’s basketball team brought home gold.
“It’s not a thing of if I consider or not,” Lyles said when asked about whether or not Team USA players could claim the world champion title. “It’s…they are. They’re Olympic champions and in the Olympic champions you face the whole world.
“And they saw how difficult it is,” Lyles added. “And of course they came out on top and of course I knew they would. Because we have some of the greatest athletes but they saw you can’t just slap everybody together and say “This is a great team.” You know there was a ton of countries out there who said ‘Hey we’re not lying down just because we don’t play in the NBA. You know we have cohesion. We have our own way of playing the game.’ And there was a lot of close calls. But again, like myself, I have confidence in the U.S. basketball team that they were going to make it all the way.”
Lyles ran what’s considered his event — the 200-meter dash — and finished third despire running with COVID-19 and a 102-degree fever on Friday, and this was just days after winning 100-meter gold in dramatic fashion.
This doesn’t seem to be Lyles’ only beef with the recognition NBA players get compared to track and field athletes.
Circulating on Sunday was a TIME feature from late June on Lyles that included an anecdote about tension with shoe sponsor Adidias over an invitation to a sneaker event for Minnesota Timberwolves star and Team USA guard Anthony Edwards.
Adidas had been negotiating a contract extension with Lyles last year and invited him to Edwards’ shoe release.
Lyles didn’t seem pleased.
“You want to do what?” Lyles told TIME. “You want to invite me to [an event for] a man who has not even been to an NBA Finals? In a sport that you don’t even care about? And you’re giving him a shoe? No disrespect: the man is an amazing athlete. He is having a heck of a year. I love that they saw the insight to give him a shoe, because they saw that he was going to be big. All I’m asking is, ‘How could you not see that for me?’”
TIME notes that Adidas declined to comment, and they signed Lyles to a new deal with the company, and according to them, the most lucrative track-and-field contract in the post-Usain Bolt era.
