After Noah Lyles ran the 200-meter dash with a positive COVID-19 diagnosis, he was celebrated and held up as a symbol of everything wrong with the Paris Olympics officials’ management of the health of their athletes. Now, videos that appear to show Lyles at a party have made him the subject of criticism.
Although there is no context for the video, the 200-meter finals occurred Aug. 8. Lyles took a COVID test, which came back positive the morning of Aug. 6. If Lyles had COVID when he won the 100-meter dash, this puts the timeline at right around five days, which, according to Yale Medicine, is the window that the anti-viral drug Paxlovid is designed to work within to reduce the probability of hospitalization for high-risk patients.
On Aug. 11, Lyles posted a picture of a negative COVID-19 test to his Twitter/X account with the caption, “Thank God, I am Covid-free.”
His seemingly quick recovery prompted fans to mock Lyles, insinuating that despite the athlete collapsing on the track after running the 200-meter finals, Lyles used having COVID-19 as an excuse for losing the race.
According to STAT, Lyles isolated himself in a hotel, took Paxlovid, and tried to rest and hydrate as often as possible. In addition, Lyles has a pre-existing condition, asthma, that places him at risk for serious complications. According to the outlet, Lyles, despite the risks to his health posed by COVID, never seriously considered not competing in the event.
Arthur L. Caplan, the Mitty Professor and head of the Division of Medical Ethics at the NYU Grossman School of Medicine, described a positive COVID diagnosis as something that athletes will happily overlook.
“It is absurd to leave the final decision to compete at the Olympics to any athlete. They will
all say yes. Their focus is on winning; most are young and feel immortal, and they aren’t thinking much either about others or the long-term impact of risky competition on their health.” Caplan wrote.Caplan continued, “The point of having health and medical expertise at any event, including the Olympics, is to ensure the health, short- and long-term, of the athletes, staff, coaches and officials. While the world has tired of COVID-19, it has not tired of harming us. Anyone with COVID-19 in the tight confines of the Olympics should be revealing their infection, isolating, not competing depending on the intimacy required of their sport, and not mingling with others. Leaving decisions about competition up to each athlete is abnegating the duty to protect all who are participating in the games.”
According to Scientific American, Lyles is one of 20 Olympic athletes who have tested positive; it remains
unknown how many may have the disease but present no symptoms. If anything, Lyles allegedly partying while potentially being COVID-19 positive reflects how many treat COVID-19, even the officials at the Olympics.According to experts, that decision is inconsistent with the science of infection itself. Dr. Ziyad Al-Aly, a researcher and St. Louis-based doctor who works on long COVID, told Prism Reports, “I think it’s a step in the wrong direction. I think they’re really learning the wrong lesson from this pandemic … There’s no argument against maintaining the five-day isolation guideline. I think it’s primarily politically motivated.”
As for Lyles’ decision to run while COVID positive, Nathan Crumpton, who competed in the 2020 Tokyo Olympics and suffers from long COVID despite being vaccinated, bashed Lyles’ actions in an interview with CNN. “The fact that he risked infection and the health of his competitors by embracing them in close quarters…it’s maddening,” he said. “It’s irresponsible and ignorant, and I hope he didn’t infect anyone else.”
According to Dr. Isabell von Loga, a researcher at University Hospital Zurich and one of Crumpton’s doctors, “There is a genuine risk that he put his long-term health at risk. But of course, time will tell, and we truly wish him that this would not happen. Covid is NOT just another respiratory disease. It affects all systems of the body,” von Loga told CNN.
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