Olympians Noah Lyles and Junelle Bromfield are ready to sprint down the aisle. The two athletes are engaged!
The couple, who have been dating for about two years, shared their engagement news in a sweet Instagram post Oct. 13. The joint post featured a romantic video set to Snoh Aalegra's "Do 4 Love"
In the video, which was filmed on Saturday, Oct. 12, Lyles and Bromfield walked through the doorway of a home and were greeted with pink rose petals covering the floor. The gold medalist, who wore a black suit, and Bromfield, dressed to the nines in a sparkly silver dress, held hands as he led her outside. There, they found a candle display and some of their loved ones standing beside an illuminated sign that read, "Will you marry me?"
Bromfield covered her face in shock as Lyles knelt on one knee and popped the question. He slipped the ring on her finger, and they shared a kiss.
Get top local stories in DFW delivered to you every morning. Sign up for NBC DFW's News Headlines newsletter.
The Team Jamaica athlete and her fiancé laughed as she showed off her ring to the camera.
In the caption, Lyles wrote, "To My Future Wife I Will Love You Forever," and added a ring emoji.
On her page, Bromfield uploaded a video of her celebrating the engagement with her friends. She stood in the middle of her friends, who danced around her, before strutting toward the camera and giving a better look at the sparkler on her finger.
Sports Connection
Connecting you to your favorite North Texas sports teams as well as sports news around the globe.
"ENGAGED," she simply captioned the post.
Celebrities and friends celebrated the couple beneath Lyles' post.
Lily Collins commented, "Congratulations you both!!!!"
Taylor Lautner wrote, "LETS GO" and included a raising hands emoji and a red heart.
Fellow Team USA star Coco Gauff said, "congratulations !!!"
The happy couple's news comes after they spent the summer supporting each other at the 2024 Paris Olympics. Lyles ran for Team USA and brought home gold in the men’s 100-meter final and bronze in the men’s 200-meter final after testing positive for COVID-19.
Bromfield competed in track and field events for Team Jamaica but did not medal.
Keep reading to learn more about Bromfield and her relationship with Lyles.
How did Noah Lyles and Junelle Bromfield meet? They shared their story
In his Aug. 21 appearance on TODAY, Lyles said about their initial connection: "Somebody slid into somebody’s DMs."
"It wasn’t me," he answered when asked who sent the first message.
They shared more details about their virtual connection in a June 2024 joint interview on the "Fast Lane Lifestyle" podcast.
Lyles, forewarning it would be a long story, said Bromfield first “slid into his DMs” in 2017, though it took them until 2022 to become a couple.
Lyles said he was protective when they first met.
“I’m young to the scene. I’m over here thinking, as she puts it, ‘I just broke the 300 indoor record. I can’t be, you know, just be giving my number out to nobody.’ You never know who be trying to take advantage of you,” Lyles said in between laughs.
They finally exchanged numbers a few weeks later, but couldn’t meet up because their practice schedules conflicted.
Finally, in 2018, Lyles and Bromfield went on a first date — but “it didn’t click,” Lyles said.
“It didn’t click at all,” Bromfield echoed. “Let’s just be friends.”
Later in the year, they reconnected when Lyles and his teammates went to Jamaica for a track meet. He asked Bromfield for a recommendation for a place to go out.
She met them there, and they danced “the whole night,” Lyles said. “Maybe there is something there,” he remembered thinking.
Scheduling conflicts continued to pose an obstacle for the couple. Lyles invited Bromfield to his mom’s wedding in Jamaica, but she couldn’t make it.
They both entered into other relationships. “We knew we liked each other, so we would stop texting whenever anybody got into a relationship,” Lyles said.
Still, they would continue to run into each other, including at the 2020 Tokyo Olympics. When his long-term relationship ended, Lyles reached out to Bromfield. Eventually, he said, “I’m going to ask her to be my girlfriend.”
He asked her. Bromfield, on the podcast, said she responded, “I don’t want to ruin our friendship. It’s going to be a long-distance relationship.”
Lyles proposed that they date for three months and then check in about if they wanted to keep going. “Every month from then, we would have a reassessment,” he said.
She said yes and they've been together ever since.
In addition to being a runner, Bromfield has a law degree
Bromfield graduated in 2020 with a bachelor’s degree in law from University of Technology in Kingston, Jamaica, her 2024 Paris Olympics page says.
She’s a fellow Olympian
Both Lyles and Bromfield have medals. Bromfield won bronze at the 2020 Tokyo Games in the women’s 4x400 meter relay.
After the 2024 Paris Olympics, Lyles gushed about Bromfield in an interview on TODAY in August. During the sit-down, Bromfield also appeared on air to support Lyles.
“Hey, baby!” he said live on TV, as she waved at him from another area of the set.
When TODAY’s Craig Melvin asked Lyles to share more about her, he started showering Bromfield with compliments.
“Junelle, a two-time Olympian, Olympic bronze medal winner, multi-world championship medalist. She’s been running since she was 8 years old, making teams for Jamaica, so she’s very talented in her own right,” he said.
“She ran at the Olympics this year in the open 400-meters, and I’m so proud of her,” he added. “She’s a survivor. She’s a fighter. She’s savvy. As my mom would say, ‘She has a bounce-back ability.’ No matter what happens, she’ll be able to get up and come back. Those are similar qualities I find in myself that I think we relate to.”
They’ve been friends for 8 years
In a post from August 2023, Bromfield and Lyles celebrated seven years of friendship, six months of dating and one year of being partners, she wrote on Instagram at the time.
You can catch their relationship unfold on camera
The couple appears in “Sprint,” a Netflix docuseries that follows track and field athletes as they prepared for 2024 Paris Games. Their banter-filled dynamic also unfolds in Bromfield's Instagram series “Mic’d Up Junelle.”
He seemingly bought her a car
Bromfield posted a video earlier this year of Lyles pulling back a cover from what appeared to be a new car. She clapped as the SUV became visible.
“First car,” she captioned the post. “Paper work took so long my excitement ran out. Thank you baby.”
Lyles encouraged Bromfield to go to therapy after experiencing significant loss
Bromfield has been competing while managing the loss of some family members, including her mother in 2021.
After qualifying for the Paris Olympics in July, she told outlet The Inside Lane that advancing took a weight off her shoulders.
“It means a lot because it feels as if a burden has been lifted off my shoulders. For the past couple of years, it’s been very hard mentally because I have a lot of loss in my family and I’m just recovering,” she said.
What has helped "a lot," she said, was therapy.
“I started therapy like two years ago because my boyfriend is big on therapy, and he felt as if I needed it, too. Honestly, it has helped a lot because I feel as if I’ve been suffering with survival guilt, and it was basically laying on my shoulders,” she said.
“And now I’m like, you know, I’ve got to live my life and just enjoy every moment of it cause life is short,” she added.
This article first appeared on TODAY.com. Read more from TODAY here:
