WHAT LYLES
WEARS

A swoosh on the chest, three stripes on the feet

Look at the photograph below and you can see the whole arrangement at once. The suit says USA and carries one swoosh. The spikes carry three stripes. Lyles has been an adidas athlete since he was 19, and at the Olympics and World Championships he still runs with a rival's logo on his chest.

The chest belongs to the federation. USA Track & Field and Nike announced in April 2014 an extension that runs from 2017 to 2040, reported at about US$500 million, and it makes Nike the exclusive supplier of the national team at the Olympics and every World Championships. For a Worlds, USATF's team manager has explained, each athlete picks four competition uniforms from the Nike range and is handed around thirty more pieces of training, travel and podium clothing, most of it at the selection meet.

The feet belong to the athlete. World Athletics regulation C7.2 says a federation may not direct an athlete to wear the kit maker's shoes on the field of play; the podium is the exception. The same rules allow one manufacturer logo on the front of a national top, no bigger than 40 square centimetres, and no personal sponsor anywhere on it. So on a Team USA suit there is a swoosh, a flag and three letters, and the only adidas mark in the stadium is the one he is standing on.

We cover the federation side of this in The History of Athletics in the USA and USA 2025.

Full adidas: the rest of the year

The rest of the year there is no split. At Diamond League meetings he is simply an adidas athlete, and the same is true of the two meets Americans care about most. At the US Championships and the Olympic Trials athletes compete for their sponsor or club, not for Team USA, and the official result sheets print the affiliation beside each name. His reads adidas in 2018, 2025 and 2026. How that selection meet works is set out in The US Olympic Trials Explained.

The picture above has a joke built into it. He wins his first national title in an orange adidas singlet, and the board he runs past says NIKE.COM, because Nike sponsors the championship as well as the national team. Even the bib pinned to his adidas top has a small swoosh on it.

At the 2024 Trials the kit changed from race to race: all red with white stripes for the 100 m, a yellow top with pink half tights after the 200. Whether adidas cut those as one-offs for him is not on record. The rules for that meet are tight, since USATF's uniform guide caps a maker's logo at 30 square centimetres, but they let the three stripes run down the side of a suit as a decorative strip up to ten centimetres wide, which is why his suits look the way they do.

The deal: 2016, then 2024

Noah and his younger brother Josephus signed with adidas on 22 July 2016, straight out of high school in Alexandria, Virginia, weeks before they were due to enrol at the University of Florida. It was Josephus's eighteenth birthday. The Washington Post reported eight-year contracts, with adidas paying for their education and providing a chaperone at meets until they turned 21.

That first deal ran to the Paris Olympics. The extension was announced on 26 February 2024 by his agency, not by adidas, and the release called it “the richest contract in the sport of track and field” since Usain Bolt retired. Read that for what it is: a claim by the athlete's own representatives, with no figure attached. His agent cited a non-disclosure agreement, and the release said only that the deal runs through the end of the decade and covers the Los Angeles Games of 2028. The numbers that circulate are outside estimates.

The contract covers more than clothes. On a podcast in 2025 he said that leaving adidas would cost him his long-time coach, Lance Brauman, who is paid by the brand, along with his training group in Clermont, Florida, and its facilities.

What it has not produced is a shoe with his name on it. After the Paris final he said publicly that he wanted one, a sneaker and not a spike. In November 2025 an adidas running executive told Footwear News he could not confirm anything and would not rule it out. Nothing had been announced by September 2026.

The spikes

The spikes are easier to pin down than the contract. In the summer of his 19.31, the American 200 m record he still holds, Running Warehouse wrote that he was racing in the redesigned Adizero Prime SP 2, and in January 2025 he was reported naming that model as the best sprint spike when a fan asked.

For the Olympic 100 m final in Paris, which he won by five thousandths of a second in 9.79, adidas says he wore a customised pair of Adizero Prime SP 3 Strung x Y-3, the collaboration with Yohji Yamamoto's label. It was not a prototype. The Y-3 article number, JH6028, sits inside the Prime SP 3 Strung entry on the World Athletics approved list, valid from 1 June 2024, and the shoe was sold in a very limited run days before the final. Grant Holloway won the hurdles in the same model.

The standard Prime SP 3 Strung costs US$180. RunRepeat's lab measured it at 193 grams with a forefoot stack of 19.6 mm, a whisker under the 20 mm limit, and a heel 8.5 mm lower than the forefoot, the negative drop we explain in Sprint Spikes.

After that the record thins out. At the Tokyo World Championships in 2025 Footwear News described electric green adidas spikes with pearls set along the three stripes, without naming the model. The Adizero Prime SP 4 has been on the approved list since 15 July 2025, and nobody has reported whether he races in it. For 2026 there is nothing at all.

Socks, pearls and a briefcase

Lyles treats the walk to the blocks as part of the job, and most of it is documented. Red Incredibles socks for that first US title in 2018, Speed Racer socks at the Diamond League final in Zurich two months later. Hair dyed silver in 2019 for Goku of Dragon Ball. At the 2024 Trials, Yu-Gi-Oh! cards pulled from his singlet during introductions, out of a silver briefcase that Snoop Dogg carried onto the track. Pearls in his braids in Paris, and painted nails.

One of those kits has already left his hands the way this kind of kit usually does, as a gift and not a sale: his Team USA singlet, stars-and-stripes socks and signed bib from Doha 2019 are in the World Athletics Heritage Collection.

Where he stands

In 2025 he won a fourth straight world 200 m title in 19.52, level with Bolt, and took bronze in the 100. In 2026 he won in Rome in 9.88, set a world best of 14.67 for 150 m in Ostrava, and ran 9.79 for the US title in New York, equal to his Paris time and the fastest in the world at that point. Two days later he pulled up in the 200 final, and on 4 September he ended his season, saying a small strain kept flaring up. He is 29, and he has said the plan now is 2027 and 2028.

What you can and cannot buy

The model he raced in is on sale. The Adizero Prime SP 3 Strung is a production spike, the Y-3 edition turns up as leftover stock and on the resale market, and both the Prime SP 2 and the newer SP 4 are ordinary retail shoes. adidas has also sold lifestyle collections with his face on them, a 100 Thieves collaboration in 2025 and a Crunchyroll anime capsule during the Tokyo championships.

What is not on sale is everything else in the pictures. There is no Lyles signature shoe. His customised race pairs are one-offs. The Team USA kit is handed to team members at processing, piece by piece. And we found no retail listing for any of the adidas suits he races in the rest of the year.

That last category is what this archive holds: adidas athlete issue, made for the brand's contracted runners and never stocked in a shop. These two are from 2024, the season of his Olympic title, in the cobalt blue and lemon of that year's issue.

Athlete issue · in the archiveAdidas Pro Elite Team 2024 Half TightsSemi cobalt blue with three lucid lemon stripes down the thigh: the 2024 adidas athlete issue, the same sprint half tight cut he wore under a different colour at the Trials.200,00 €View piece →

Athlete issue · in the archiveAdidas Pro Elite 2024 Men Rheon Short Tights – Special EditionThe Special Edition of the same season, cobalt with a black wave print and adidas's RHEON panels.150,00 €View piece →

The full 2024 cycle is laid out in Adidas Pro Elite 2024, the brand's story in The History of Adidas Pro Elite, and the tiers in What Is Pro Elite Clothing?.