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With Team USA men’s basketball looking to prove a point at the 2024 Paris Olympics, wanting to show that the rest of the world hasn’t caught up to them on the court, many tuned in to see if LeBron James and the star-studded squad could come out on top and bring a gold medal back to the United States.
Fortunately, Steve Kerr’s squad accomplished its mission, holding off Serbia and France and avoiding some close calls to come home victorious.
However, one Olympic athlete for the United States, sprinter Noah Lyles, didn’t come without a fair amount of controversy as he doesn’t like that champions in the NBA and NFL call themselves world champions when they aren’t competing on international stages.
Obviously, this didn’t sit well with American professional athletes, and Lyles received a lot of backlash from them as a result.
New York Knicks star Josh Hart went as far as to say he was rooting against the track and field star in the Olympics because of what he said.
“I really wanted him to lose,” Hart said to Knicks teammate Jalen Brunson, via the “Roommates Show.” “… I think this was the first time all of the NBA Twitter like banded together and was just hatin’.”
Josh on Noah Lyles:
“I really wanted him to lose… you know what, respect. I can’t even hate no more.”
Full episode: https://t.co/UxWjUlxx5M pic.twitter.com/s9noouVwan
— Roommates Show (@Roommates__Show) August 15, 2024
Hart likely wasn’t alone rooting against Lyles, as it is highly likely that many players in the NBA and NFL were possibly doing the same thing, even though it would come off as not being patriotic.
In the end, it seems like all is well, with Lyles not getting as much heat as he did before the Olympics, considering he came away with a gold medal in the 100-meter dash before falling to a bronze medal in the 200-meter dash after reportedly testing positive for COVID.
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