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Olympic 100m champion Noah Lyles is not one of the two finalists for the title of male track athlete of the year, World Athletics revealed on Monday.
Lyles won one of the closest Olympic finals in history, winning gold in Paris in August by five thousandths of a second ahead of Jamaica’s Kishane Thompson.
But Lyles is absent as Olympic 200m champion Letsile Tebogo of Namibia and Norwegian 5,000m gold medalist Jakob Ingebrigtsen were the two male track athletes to advance to the final.
The American was aiming for an Olympic double in the sprint but had to settle for the bronze medal in the 200m behind Tebogo and his American teammate Kenny Bednarek.
Lyles later revealed he had run the 200m despite testing positive for Covid-19.
In contrast, the winner of the Olympic women’s 100m final, Julien Alfred of Saint Lucia, is one of two finalists on the women’s track.
She will face Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone, the American who broke her own world record to win the Olympic 400m hurdles title for the second time in a row.
World Athletics said the top two in each category – athletics, field and non-stadium – were chosen in a first round of voting, which included votes from the World Athletics Council, officials and dignitaries linked to the sport known as the “World Athletics Family”. “, and a public vote on social networks.
New this year, a final round of voting by fans of the sport, from Monday to November 10, will determine the world athlete of the year.
In the field events, Olympic men’s pole vault champion and world record holder Mondo Duplantis will be the hot favorite to win the men’s prize.
The Swede faces Greece’s Miltiadis Tentoglou, who won gold in the men’s long jump in Paris.
Ukrainian high jumper Yaroslava Mahuchikh, who broke the 37-year-old women’s world record with a jump of 2.10m four weeks before winning Olympic gold, will face three-time Olympic heptathlon champion Nafissatou Thiam of Belgium .
The women’s non-stadium award pits marathon world record holder Ruth Chepngetich of Kenya against Sifan Hassan of the Netherlands, who won the Paris Olympic marathon.
In the men’s category, Brian Pintado, Ecuador’s 20km walk gold medalist at the Paris Games, will face Olympic men’s marathon champion Tamirat Tola of Ethiopia.
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