Noah Lyles fails to make cut for men's world track athlete of year

Olympic 100m champion Noah Lyles is not one of the two finalists for male track athlete of the year, World Athletics revealed on Monday.

Lyles won one of the closest Olympic finals in history to take gold in Paris in August by five thousandths of a second from Kishane Thompson of Jamaica.

But Lyles misses out as 200m Olympic champion Letsile Tebogo of Botswana and Norway's 5000m gold medallist Jakob Ingebrigtsen were the two male track athletes to make the final.

The American was aiming for an Olympic sprint double but had to settle for the 200m bronze medal behind Tebogo and his US teammate Kenny Bednarek.

Lyles later revealed he had raced in the 200m despite testing positive for Covid-19.

In contrast, the winner of the Olympic women's 100m final, Julien Alfred of St Lucia, is one of the two women's track finalists.

She will be up against Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone, the American who broke her own world record to win the Olympic 400m hurdles title for a second time in a row.

World Athletics said the top two in each category – track, field and out of stadium – were chosen from a first round of voting, which comprised votes from the World Athletics Council, officials and dignitaries connected to the sport known as the "World Athletics Family", and a public vote on social media.

In a new addition to this year's awards, a final round of votes cast by fans of the sport from Monday until November 10 will decide the overall World Athlete of the Year.

In the field events, Olympic men's pole vault champion and world record holder Mondo Duplantis will be hot favourite to take the men's award.

The Swede is up against Miltiadis Tentoglou of Greece, who won the men's long jump gold in Paris.

Ukrainian high jumper Yaroslava Mahuchikh, who broke the 37-year-old women's world record with a clearance of 2.10m four weeks before taking Olympic gold, will go head-to-head with three-time Olympic heptathlon champion Nafissatou Thiam of Belgium.

The women's out-of-stadium award pits world marathon record holder Ruth Chepngetich of Kenya against Sifan Hassan of the Netherlands, who won the Olympic marathon in Paris.

In the men's category Brian Pintado, the Ecuadorean gold medallist in the 20km race walk at the Paris Games, will compete against Olympic men's marathon champion Tamirat Tola from Ethiopia.

gj/pb/iwd