There was no place for reigning Olympic 100 metre champion Noah Lyles when Usain Bolt named his dream 4 x 100 m team.
Bolt, 39, is the fastest man of all time and finished his career with eight Olympic gold medals and remains both the 100m (9.58 seconds) and 200m (19.19s) world record holder, both of which he set at the 2009 IAAF World Athletics Championships in Berlin, Germany.
To add to his individual accolades, the great Jamaican also holds the 4 x 100m relay world record (36.84s) with Nesta Carter, Michael Frater and Yohan Blake.
The quartet smashed the previous record by two-tenths of a second at London 2012.
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Fast forward four years, and Jamaica prevailed again with Asafa Powell, Yohan Blake, Nick Ashmeade and Bolt clocking a time of 37.27s at Rio 2016.
By winning his third sprint event of the games, Bolt became the first athlete to win all three sprint events at three Olympics and at that point boasted nine gold medals.
However, the 2008 Jamaican relay team were stripped of their gold medals from the Beijing games.
This was because Carter had a drug test re-analysed nine years after he ran the first leg of the men’s 4 x 100m relay in China.
The International Olympic Committee (IOC) said Carter’s sample tested positive for the prohibited substance methylhexaneamine.
Carter appealed the decision to strip him, but this was dismissed by the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS), and he served a three-month ban.
As a result, Frater, Bolt and Powell were stripped alongside Carter.
Since 2016, the Jamaican men’s team have not won the 4 x 100m relay crown, with Italy winning in Tokyo in 2021 before Canada triumphed at Paris 2024.
In terms of World Championships, Team USA have had the upper hand in recent times, winning the 4 x 100m crown at both the 2025 and 2023 World Championships.
Christian Coleman, Kenneth Bednarek, Courtney Lindsey and Lyles clocked a time of 37.29s in September 2025, causing Lyles to say “we all know we are the fastest” after the race.
However, when Bolt put together his ‘dream’ relay team, there was no place for Lyles.
Speaking on The High Performance Podcast in October 2024, Bolt was pressed on the topic and gave an unsurprising answer.
“Wow, wow, wow, wow, wow," Bolt said.
"It would definitely be Asafa [Powell] to start, then Justin [Gatlin], Yohan Blake and me at anchor. Those would be the four."
Topics: Usain Bolt, Noah Lyles, Athletics, Olympics, Jamaica
Luke Davies