Olympic 100-meter champ Noah Lyles is not going to race NFL star Tyreek Hill in 2025. But on Friday, Lyles will line up for a far more interesting competition: the 200 meters at the Herculis Diamond League meet in Monaco, where he will face Olympic 200m champion Letsile Tebogo of Botswana.
It doesn’t get much bigger than this in the sprint world. Olympic champion versus Olympic champion in the event both of them are probably best at, the 200m. The man who has dominated the first half of the 2020s versus the main poised to dominate the second. Under the iconic arches of Stade Louis II on a Friday night. The big prize — the World Championships in Tokyo — is still two months away, but this is as good as it gets for a regular-season race.
Unlike the Lyles-Hill match race, which the two men hyped for months before it fell apart, Lyles-Tebogo is a race that few even knew was happening until Lyles announced it on Instagram on Tuesday, just three days before the race. For track fans, the announcement felt like Christmas in July.
The anticipation began as soon as last year’s Olympic 200m final finished in Paris. In that race, Tebogo, then just 21 years old, sprinted away to the gold medal, running a personal-best 19.46 to hand Lyles his first defeat in his specialty distance in three years.
As Tebogo took his victory lap around the Stade de France, Lyles collapsed to the purple track in exhaustion, leaving the finish area in a wheelchair before revealing he had been competing with COVID-19. Immediately, the sprint world began to wonder what Lyles, who had won the 100m in Paris but has run 19.46 or faster just twice in his career, could have done if he was fully fit.
With Lyles shutting his season down after the Olympics and racing just once so far in the 2025 outdoor season, track fans have had to wait a while for the rematch. We’ll finally get it on Friday night on one of the Diamond League’s biggest stages in Monaco.
The race will be sponsored by Lyles’ production company, Iconic Productions, which he launched last month in partnership with Box To Box Films, the company behind Sprint and Formula 1: Drive to Survive.
The race takes place at 3:27 p.m. ET (9:27 p.m. CEST) and when the meet ends at 4 p.m. ET, we’ll break down all of the action for you live — or on-demand if you join our Supporters Club.
There is a tendency, upon hearing news like this, to proceed with a degree of caution. This is track & field, where if something sounds too good to be true, it often is. Olympic champions Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone and Marileidy Paulino were meant to race each other in the 400 meters at Grand Slam Track Los Angeles…until the meet was cancelled with two weeks to go. Tebogo was supposed to race Olympic silver medalist Kenny Bednarek in the 200 at last week’s Prefontaine Classic…until Bednarek withdrew the day before the meet.
But given how late the race confirmation came, there is good reason to be optimistic that Lyles v. Tebogo is really going to happen. Lyles already arrived in Monaco on Tuesday.
Lyles has competed sparingly so far in 2025. Over the winter, he ran a scaled-back indoor schedule of just two meets, compared to four in 2023 and 2024. Outdoors, Lyles opened up at the Tom Jones Invitational at the University of Florida, where he ran 45.87 in his first 400m race in nine years as well as a leg on the 4 x 100 relay. That was on April 19, and Lyles has not competed since.
Lyles was meant to race at the adidas Atlanta City Games on May 17 but withdrew due to a sore foot. Lyles’ manager Mark Wetmore told LetsRun.com that Lyles had to scale back his training for about two weeks due to the inflammation, but said he has been training well since early June. Going from no races in almost three months to a Diamond League race against the Olympic champion is a significant step up, but Lyles knows what he is getting into. It is unlikely he would fly out to Europe for this race if he did not think he was in shape to contend for the win.
It’s not all that different from the situation Tebogo found himself in at last week’s Prefontaine Classic. Though Tebogo competed in early-season Diamond Leagues in Xiamen, Keqiao, and Doha, he looked sluggish, and he put his season on pause after struggling to a 10.43, last-place finish in the 100m in Rabat on May 25. Tebogo took a few weeks off from training to deal with a nagging hamstring injury, but when he returned at Pre on July 5, he looked revitalized, running a world-leading 19.76.
Now he will face Lyles in Monaco, and as the Olympic 200m champion coming off a season’s best, he will be favored. But you would be foolish to discount Lyles completely. Lyles has not lost a Diamond League 200-meter race in more than six years — he has won 11 straight since Michael Norman beat him in Rome in June 2019.
And though Tebogo won their last matchup and most significant matchup in the Olympics in Paris, that represents Tebogo’s only victory over Lyles in nine career meetings (six in the 100m, three in the 200m).
The reality is, Lyles hardly ever loses in the 200m. Since losing to Norman in his 200m opener in 2019, he’s undefeated in the 200 except for two huge losses — the 2021 and 2024 Olympics. A 28-2 record at 200 over his last 30 races means he wins 93.3% of the time.
Of course, Lyles had the advantage of age and experience for many of those matchups (their first encounter, at the 2022 Prefontaine Classic, came when Tebogo was just 18). Now, however, the age advantage is starting to tilt in Tebogo’s favor. Tebogo, who turned 22 last month, is just entering his prime. Lyles, who turns 28 next week, may only have a year or two left of his.
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London up next for Lyles, but Hill showdown will have to wait
After Monaco, Lyles will stay in Europe for next weekend’s London Diamond League, where he is scheduled to contest the 100 meters, before returning to the US for the USATF Outdoor Championships in Eugene from July 31-August 3. Lyles has not announced which event he will run at USAs, but it does not make a huge difference — he has a bye to the World Championships in both the 100 and 200 meters as the defending champion.
One race that will not happen this year is the ballyhooed showdown with Miami Dolphins wide receiver Tyreek Hill. Between Lyles’ injury and the start of Dolphins training camp on July 22, there was only a limited window for the race to take place.
According to an industry source, the two men had been scheduled to race over 60 meters in June in New York, but circumstances caused the event to be delayed. However, the source said, negotiations remain ongoing and there is still hope that the event could take place early in 2026.
In April, police were called to Hill’s house in response to a domestic dispute with his wife, but he police subsequently closed their investigation without charging Hill. He raced twice in June, running 10.15 for 100 meters at a meet in Sherman Oaks, Calif., on June 13, and a wind-aided 10.15 (+2.7) at the ATX Sprint Classic in Texas on June 28, where he defeated Lyles’ brother Josephus in the preliminary round (Hill did not contest the final).
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