If Noah Lyles lacked anything to crown a glorious August, it was to demonstrate that his greatness is not only on display on the tracks but that, outside them and in front of the press, he is also capable of achieving interesting levels of excellence.
Soon after achieving a historic golden triplet in the World Athletics Championships (100, 200 and 4x100), the Florida phenomenon left a reflection whose specific weight - and in my opinion, a high degree of veracity - was made clear, among other things, from the fierce reactions it provoked at different levels of the main professional sports in the United States.
“You know the thing that hurts me the most is that I have to watch the NBA Finals and they have World Champion on their head. World Champion of what? The United States? Don´t get me wrong, I love the United States, at times, but that aint the world. That is not the world. We are the world. We have almost every country out here fighting, thriving, putting on their flag to show that they are represented. There ain’t no flags in the NBA”.
A long list of figures, and not so much, from the NBA, the NFL or the MLB jumped around the sprinter’s neck. There was no shortage of people who, without too many arguments at hand, spoke of a certain level of resentment. Logical. The world of sports and finance knows perfectly well how much less popular, monetary and sponsorship recognition a world champion and Olympic athlete deserves than a standard player in the North American major leagues.
However, what Lyles says is so true that, at the same time this controversy unfolds, there is a United States national team playing in the basketball world championship.
A championship that that country won only five times out of a total of eighteen. A championship that they won three of the last seven, not by chance a period in which it integrated his rosters precisely with NBA players.
The link between North American basketball and that of the rest of the world has had ample evidence not only of understanding the evolution of the game but also of growing interest in public opinion at world championships and, above all, the Olympic Games. An interest largely boosted by a handful of defeats, especially that of Seoul 88, in which they finished in third place behind the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia.
From then on, two unique things happened. On one hand, players from hitherto unconsidered nations began to proliferate in the NBA. Russians, Serbs, Croats, Lithuanians, Germans, French, Spanish, Italians, Argentines, Brazilians, Mexicans and many others not only populated the franchises, but many of them were decisive for their teams to win titles.
On the other hand, it was not by chance that in Barcelona 92 the most remarkable, but rather unique, Dream Team, landed. Jordan, Johnson, Bird, Pippen, Barkley, Malone, Drexler, Robinson, Stockton, Ewing, Mullin... a veritable constellation of stars gave the Olympic tournament an unmatched brilliance. And they proved it by overwhelmingly winning all eight games of the tournament.
These are just a couple of isolated references to the fact that, beyond Lyles’ technical certainty, many of the main protagonists of the league have made it clear how important those tournaments that really consecrate the world champion are.
No one can argue that the NBA is, by far, the best and most wonderful basketball league on the planet. Difficult to match even for major tournaments in other sports.
It’s simply a matter of calling things by their names.
In that sense, when Lyles talks about loving his country but that the United States is not the world, he makes an unthinkable contribution to the community.
Those of us who live on this side of the planet tend to remember that, when someone refers to the United States as America, they do not know that it is a continent made up of a total of 36 countries.
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