Noah Lyles, Hummingbirds & the Myth of Normal
There's nothing normal about being normal, and we should stop behaving otherwise.
US sprinter Noah Lyles won the 2024 men’s Olympic 100m gold in one of the greatest ever races in that event. The eight finalists all ran pretty much the same time, with just 0.12 seconds separating first and last place. But races have winners, and the gold was awarded to Lyles by just 0.005 of a second ahead of Kishane Thompson, thanks to some incredible precise timekeeping wizardry.
I am told that the typical wingbeat of a hummingbird is around 80 beats per second.
That means that a hummingbird would have flapped its wings a little over 782 times in the 9.784 seconds that it took Noah Lyles to run the 100m. To put it another way, Lyles beat Thompson by less than half the beat of a hummingbird’s wing.
We can go to incredible lengths to differentiate between human beings if we so wish. We can divide them, parse them, rank and sort them. We can time them, weigh them, and we can test them. Competitive athletics is built upon the premise that individual athletes or teams engage with the goal of identifying a rank order between them: who scored the most goals or tries; who ran the fastest, jumped the highest, threw the farthest, or lifted the heaviest weight. Tied or drawn competitions may be hard fought but they can leave a slightly unsatisfying sense of unfinished business1. So we go to extra time, golden goal, or penalties, all to arrive at that ultimate rank order where there can be only one winner.
After the world of athletics there are two other places which are preeminent in the sorting and ordering of human beings: hospitals and schools. In the world of medicine, precision and order are everything if individual patient needs are to be met and death is to be avoided (check out Gawande’s Checklist Manifesto if you don’t believe me). No two cases of the same disease or injury are the same, as the patients are different. They each require subtle and precise differences in medication, dosage, treatment and care.
And whilst the stakes are not as viscerally high in the world of education, schools have developed diverse and intricate ways to sort, grade, rank and rate young people. To crudely paraphrase Ken Robinson, schools are sorting factories. They also do lots of other things, don’t get me wrong. I am a huge fan of schools and of those who work in them. They provide a wide range of experiences, challenges and support mechanisms for young people as they grow through their childhood and are then released into the world. But that doesn’t invalidate the assertion that, fundamentally, schools eventually focus on the ranking, sorting and codifying of children to identify the winners, losers and also-rans: athletes have the Superbowl, or World Cup, or Olympics; doctors have the zero sum of life-or-death operations; and schools have high stakes testing and exams. That being said, whilst it is the dream of an athlete to compete in an elite final, I have yet to meet a young person whose burning ambition is to write an examination…
Let’s go back to Noah Lyles for a moment. He is an elite athlete at the very top of his sport. After winning the Olympic 100m gold, one of his first social media posts was not explicitly about his gold medal or his status as Olympic champion. It was about barriers and challenges he had overcome, and what he refuses to allow to define him.
What his post doesn't say is that he graduated from High School. That is an incredible achievement in itself for someone wrestling with so many barriers between him and what constitutes the norm of success (i.e. graduation) in a US High school. Lyles took and passed all his required classes, overcoming the challenges posed by his dyslexia and ADD. And he continues to find a way to battle not only his learning differences, but also anxiety and depression. I can guarantee that it is not just young athletes who are looking up to Noah Lyles, but countless other young people who see in him the success that they want for themselves in overcoming their own learning challenges.
I do not know much about T.C. Williams High School (now Alexandria City High School) in Virginia, where Noa Lyles studied. But if it is typical of a great many public schools in the US - and public or state schools in a great many countries to be honest - then students like Lyles more often succeed despite school, not because of school. There will have been incredible individuals who will have helped him find a way, but they will have done so in the context of a system that is designed for a notional norm. Where learning differences are graciously ‘accommodated’ or ‘recognized’, but ultimately seen as lesser, lower, and inferior to perceived societal norms. Our schools continue to reflect a reductive societal view that there is a fixed sense of what is normal. We talk about norming exam curves, and we validate the academic achievements of those who comply with the characteristics expected of that notion of normality. Somewhat ironically, as researcher Katie Segura points out, “normal has traditionally been defined in terms of the abnormal”. To be normal is not to be those other things. It is not to have dyslexia, not to have ADD or ADHD, or dyscalculia, or anxiety or depression. In other words, to be normal is not to be Noah Lyles.
Try telling that to the legions of young athletes who now want to be the next Olympic champion.
Katie Segura’s research paper Defining Normal (2015) looks at the challenge of defining normal. She argues that “an understanding of the variability of normality could help reduce discrimination and psychological misdiagnosis by increasing public awareness about the normality inherent in abnormality”. Look at that again: the normality inherent in abnormality. Her research argues very persuasively that there is no fixed or set notion of normal. That all so-called abnormality is rooted in what is commonly defined as normal, and that there is a variability at play, not a static concept. Moreover, the static view of normal is doing harm to young people who do not fit that normal mould. Imagine what it would mean for schools - and the reductive nature of terminal (sic) exams premised on so-called norms - if we embraced that ‘variability of normality’? More importantly, what would it mean for the school experience of young people like Noah Lyles who continue to face barriers as they fight to meet their school’s and society’s expectation of ‘normal’?
The eight athletes who ran almost the same times in the men’s 100m Olympic final are not the same at all. The hummingbird wing beat difference between them across that 0.12 seconds between first and eight place echoes a broader insistence that, no matter how we might pretend otherwise, we are all different. Those differences might not be visible to the naked eye, but they are there, and should be honoured not ignored: accepted as they are, not normed into what others would like them to be.
Segura, K. (2015) Defining normal. Available at: https://www.csustan.edu/sites/default/files/groups/University%20Honors%20Program/Journals/defining_normal_k._segura.pdf (Accessed 8.7.24).
With noble and notable exceptions of course. Mutaz Essa Barshim and Gianmarco Tamberi both cleared 2.37m at the Tokyo Olympics and asked if they could share the gold medal, such was their mutual respect.