USA Basketball has fired back at Noah Lyles on the back of their Olympics victory after the 100m champion made comments questioning their claim of being the sport’s world champions.
Awkwardly, however, the team have got it wrong – and fans have taken to social media to remind them.
The beef between America’s basketball titans and sprinting sensation dates back to August 2023, when Lyles mocked the NBA for calling their annual play-off winners ‘world champions’.
The 27-year-old sprinter questioned how the league could make such a claim, when all its teams are based in the US, with just one coming from Canada.
Team USA’s cast of NBA superstars picked up their fourth consecutive Olympic gold in Paris
Noah Lyles won his first Olympic gold in the 100-meter dash last Sunday in Paris
But after Team USA held off hosts France 98-87 to win Olympic gold in the men’s basketball finals on Saturday, the champions’ social team took the opportunity to deliver a clap-back they presumably believed would shut down the debate between them and Lyles once-and-for-all.
‘Are we the World Champs, now?’ a caption read above a picture of the full squad on X (formerly Twitter).
But any self-adulation would’ve quickly evaporated, as social users to Community Notes to remind them they were technically still not world champions, rather Olympic champs.
They pointed out to the fact the current world champions are actually Germany, who won the FIBA World Championship in September 2023 – a competition the US finished fourth in.
Team USA will have to win the next FIBA World Championships, which will be held in Qatar in 2027 to be legitimately able to call themselves world champions.
Fans on social were in disbelief, with one replying to USA Basketball: ‘No, because you won the Olympic Games, not the world basketball championship. Shouldn’t be that hard.’
Another simply put: ‘There’s no way it’s this difficult to understand.’
Lyles, who is both an Olympic champion and three-time world champion, started the tete-a-tete, when claiming the US should be more modest in its claims about being called world champions.
He made the comments to press last year, saying:’Don’t get me wrong, I love the US, at times, but that ain’t the world.’
That is not the world. We are the world. We have almost every country out here fighting, thriving, putting on they flag to show that they are represented. There ain’t no flags in the NBA.’
NBA teams compete for a city or a state, like the Los Angeles Lakers or Utah Jazz. Some teams have jersey colors that resemble their city’s flag, like the New York Knicks.
Yet, Lyles took the NBA’s claim of calling the winners of the Larry O’Brien Trophy ‘world champions.’
Noah Lyles is both an Olympic and world 100m champion, and a world champ in the 200m
‘The cojones of this guy calling out NBA stars for pretending to be world champions – when they’re not! – then beating the world to be Olympic 100m champion – are gigantic,’ British broadcaster Piers Morgan said, who was best known in the United States for his stint as a judge on ‘America’s Got Talent’.
‘Congrats @LylesNoah – you talked the talked and just walked the walk,’ Morgan continued with several hand-clap emojis.
The NBA is not the only American sports league to use the moniker, with the NFL and MLB also calling each season’s victor a world champion.
The MLB has one team not based in America, while none of the NFL’s 32 franchise reside outside the United States.
‘Noah Lyles had all of NBA Twitter hate watching him because of an objectively correct statement and pulled it off,’ one fan said on social media.
‘NBA Twitter tuned in for a Noah Lyles hate watch and came up empty handed let’s freaking gooooo,’ another person said on X.
