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.”