US track and field star Noah Lyles capped off a fantastic run at the U.S. track and field championships with a tense exchange with a fellow runner near the finish line.
Lyles easily won the 200-meter race with a blazing speed of 19.63. However, the American speedster could be seen turning his head and staring down the runner next to him, Kenny Bednarek, as he passed him by. Bednarek clearly didn’t appreciate the theatrics from Lyles and shoved him after the race was over.
“Noah is gonna be Noah. If he wants to stare me down, that’s fine,” Bednarek told reporters following the race. “But I ran five rounds, and he’s fresh; he can line up again when we’re both fresh and see what happens. I’m very confident I can beat him. Little personal stuff, and we’ll figure it out.”
Bednarek elected not to go into specifics about what Lyles said to him.
“What he said doesn’t matter. It’s just what he did. It’s unsportsmanlike sh*t and I don’t deal with that,” the runner explained.
The strained relationship between the two runners was also apparent before their NBC interview.
“I tell ya, if you’ve got a problem, I expect a call,” Bednarek said to Lyles at the outset of the interview.
“You know what, you’re right. You’re right. Let´s talk after this,” Lyles shot back.
Lyles said he knew that if he stayed close to Bednarek, whom he was trailing going into the final turn, he would be able to beat him.
“We came off the turn and I saw how far Kenny was and I was like, ‘As long as I can keep him in my pocket, then I can catch him,’” Lyles told reporters. “We got to the straight away, we passed the 60 meters left mark, and I’m like, ‘Yeah, I’m coming for him.’ He ran out of energy, and he ran out of momentum, and mine was just starting to hit it.”
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