When American sprinter Noah Lyles blazed to a 19.88-second win in Monaco earlier this month, many eyes were on the reigning world champion’s return to form. After recovering from an ankle injury and a stretch of illness, his powerful finish ahead of Olympic gold medalist Letsile Tebogo sent a clear message. That Lyles is not easing into 2025. He’s storming through it. Just a week later in London, he tackled his season’s first 100m, clocking 10.00 seconds behind Jamaica’s Oblique Seville. Yet amid this measured build-up to the U.S. Championships, where he plans to run every round of the 200m despite his automatic berth to the World Championships, another story from back home quietly took root, one that began not on the track, but behind the scenes…
At the center of it stands Keisha Bishop, mother to Noah and Josephus Lyles and the President and Co-Founder of The Lyles Brothers Sports Foundation. This month, she stepped into a new role as a social media ambassador for TrueSport and the United States Anti-Doping Agency (USADA). In doing so, Bishop brought the same values she instilled in her sons to a national platform. “By being a USADA/TrueSport Ambassador,” she stated, “I hope to encourage athletes and those who support them to learn the importance of teaching social and emotional skills so the whole person is being coached and not just their athletic skills.”
TrueSport, supported by USADA and backed by Congressional mandate, aims to shift the culture of youth sports through a focus on character education, clean performance, and sportsmanship. Through a structured curriculum, coaching certification, athlete engagement, and educator training, the initiative targets not just outcomes on the field but lifelong tools for success. It seeks to remedy a glaring disconnect: while 85 percent of parents believe youth sport should reinforce positive values, only 35 percent see it doing so in practice.
Bishop’s involvement, then, is more than symbolic. With decades of lived experience as a sports parent and community leader, she brings insight into the fragile balance between performance and well-being. Her foundation’s work mirrors TrueSport’s cornerstones—respect, leadership, resilience—and as an ambassador, she hopes to extend that influence to families, coaches, and institutions across the country.
In the background, Noah Lyles continues his strategic return, facing down the summer’s most elite competitors in his lead-up to Tokyo. But as his mother takes on this public role, another kind of leadership is taking shape—less about medals, more about meaning. However, it’s not just his mom. Lyles himself, too, joined TrueSport for a different initiative years ago.
Noah Lyles breaks the silence on depression and the weight behind the medals
In a conversation that rarely surfaces with such clarity in elite sport, Noah Lyles chose candor over convention during USADA’s TrueSport forum on mental wellness. Speaking not in performance metrics but in personal reckonings, the world 200m champion methodically laid bare his struggle with depression, recalling how silence in Tokyo’s Olympic stadium mirrored a deeper internal void. Lyles, known for his kinetic presence on the track, found himself disoriented by the absence of crowds, of his support team, of emotional footing.
Image Via Imago
“Every time I lose I come back stronger 19.52!!!!!!” he posted after rebounding in Eugene in 2021. Yet behind that exclamation was what he later described as five sessions of therapy, a recalibration of the mind as much as the body. “I wasn’t really feeling that my mindset was right for today,” he admitted at the time. But the return of spectators, and the visceral charge of their presence, unlocked a part of himself he had missed. “I was like: ‘Oh yeah. I have missed this feeling. This is legit what I like to see.’”
Reflecting more broadly, Lyles dismissed the notion that athletic success insulates against mental strain. “You can be in a very strong depressed state…and all you are hearing is ‘nothing, nothing, nothing…’” he said. The medals, records, and accolades, in such moments, become inaudible background noise. For Lyles, the decision to speak openly about therapy, antidepressants, and the grinding weight of pandemic-era isolation was neither calculated nor performative. It was a simple act of clarity. “It wasn’t really an issue of what people think about me.” It was, he said plainly, about breaking the silence.
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