It's Championship Szn ⏱️

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Compiled by David Melly, Paul Snyder, and Audrey Allen

A Good Weekend In The Big Apeldoorn 🍎

If there’s one winter tradition that American track fans have grown accustomed to, it’s the randomness and uncertainty of big name pros actually showing up to race during the indoor season. Even in a World Indoors year, plenty of global medal threats would rather hibernate in the comfort of balmy training camps of Southern California, Florida, or Texas, then emerge sometime in April or May with Worlds circled on the calendar.

Collegiate athletes—even those with global podium aspirations of their own—enjoy no such luxury. And that’s why historically the NCAA indoor championships are super exciting and among the highest-caliber track meets in the world. But this past weekend and a continent away, non-North American pros proved the weight of the indoor track world doesn’t need to be placed solely upon the shoulders of collegians. The European Indoor Championships rocked this year. And a big reason for that is, with a few notable exceptions, all the stars showed up.

Begrudging kudos have to go to UK Athletics, who, after years of public pressure, decided to send a robust roster to Apeldoorn, Netherlands, and were rewarded with seven medals, the third highest total behind France and the host country. They were also the source of the bigger absences — namely, Dina Asher-Smith, Josh Kerr, Laura Muir, Zharnel Hughes, Matthew Hudson-Smith, Keely Hodgkinson, and Jake Wightman — but they made up for it with 34 individual entrants, maxing out their spots in all the track events, save the hurdles.

Beyond the handful of Brits skipping out on their bite of the Apel, most of the fastest Europeans on the circuit did make the trip, including Jakob Ingebrigtsen, Femke Bol, the Kambundji sisters, and Georgia Bell. 2021 Euro Indoor champ Mondo Duplantis didn’t care to pick up another pole vault title, perhaps to give time for the ink to dry on his new world record, but three men cleared 5.90m nevertheless and had to sort out the medals on countback. And another reigning world record holder, Yaroslava Mahuchikh, successfully pulled off the threepeat in the high jump with a 1.99m leap.

Eight world leads were set, led by Jessica Schilder’s incredible 20.69m haul to win the shot put (and reset her Dutch national record in front of a home crowd), and Ditaji Kambundji’s blazing 7.67 victory in the 60m hurdles. Kambundji, who’d never broken 7.80 before last weekend, caught lightning in a bottle to knock 0.13 seconds off her PB, win her first major title, and land at T-2nd on the all-time list.

The distance races were a tale of two outcomes. In the men’s races, the theme was predictability as Ingebrigtsen picked up his sixth and seventh Euro Indoor golds in the 1500m and 3000m. On the women’s side, however, we got a pair of upsets as Frenchwoman Agathe Guillemot bided her time perfectly in the 1500m to blow past Georgia Bell in the final lap. Bell wound up out of the medals entirely as her countrywoman Revée Walcott-Nolan pipped her at the line for bronze. In the 3000m, Irishwoman Sarah Healy rode Brit Melissa Courtney-Bryant’s shoulder to the homestretch and timed her pass just right to claim a gold as her first medal of any color in a championship.

While the most jingoistic of American observers might turn up their noses at some of the shallower events, most notably the men’s 4x400m, where the Dutch team’s winning time of 3:04.95 would put them at 10th on this year’s NCAA list, all in all it was a solid showing from a continent that has historically put a lot more time, effort, and passion into indoor track than most. With World Indoors a few short weeks away, North Americans like Ronnie Baker, Grace Stark, and Sarah Mitton are probably feeling a lot less confident than they were a few days ago.

Making a regional championship compelling is a tricky balancing act. The meet has to have the right combination of star power to feel important and new faces to not feel redundant. For global fans, the familiar names are what makes the meet worth tuning in, but for participating countries, the thrill comes from seeing your flag show up on podiums where it’s normally absent. And ultimately, the athletes actually investing their own time and efforts into an event that could easily be skipped in favor of Nanjing or an outdoor season opener is what lends Euros a credibility that meet organizers can’t manufacture unilaterally.

Lastly, the proximity of Euros and NCAAs creates some food for thought in the future. The team score element of NCAAs will always make it one of the most compelling championships to watch, because the top eight finishers in every single event could influence the ultimate outcome of the meet. It’s an added team element that professional track and field sorely lacks. At global championships, the reality is that Team USA would simply run away with the points race, but European Indoors is a meet with far more parity across nations. Maybe team scoring is something worth piloting at future championships. It’d certainly do more for the fan experience than Wavelights or a long jump takeoff zone.

Apeldoorn ‘25 proved itself a worthy showcase of professional track and field. (And it actually got to be showcased, as Eurosport streamed the meet for free around the globe!) The passion that European athletes and fans have for their continental championship may never quite translate fully overseas, but this year’s edition made a solid case that it deserves its spot on the viewing calendar, regardless of your actual affiliation with any of the competing nations.

A Whole Bunch Of NCAA Titles Are Up For Grabs 🤲

Once you’ve recovered from the shock of seeing unfathomable cutoff times for this year’s event, you can throw time out the window entirely and focus on one of the greatest championship meets in track and field: the NCAA Indoor Championships.

The format of indoor NCAAs makes for one of the most entertaining, highly watchable athletic experiences a fan could dream up. It’s a tight, two-day meet where virtually every final contains team titles implications, and the outright winner is often determined by milliseconds in the final event of the meet. Even after the compression of the field into a handful of D1 super-conferences, NCAAs still offers the best chance for matchups that have been percolating all season on different coasts and in different meets to finally come to a head. And for nerds who love a “I was there first” brag, it’s a chance to peek at the Olympic stars of tomorrow as they enter their athletic prime—just ask Grant Holloway, Cole Hocker, Julian Alfred, or any of the twelve other Paris gold medalists who came up through the NCAA system.

Here’s some bookmarks for your weekend: Women’s Entries / Men’s Entries / Schedule / Live Results. The meet will be broadcast live on ESPN+ (subscription required), and the CITIUS MAG team will have boots on the ground in Virginia Beach this Friday and Saturday with updates and interviews. 

Most years, many events at NCAAs are defined by the presence of a heavy favorite—your Parker Valbys, Christopher Morales-Williamses, Nico Youngs, or Maia Ramsdens. But this year, it feels a little different: so many races, especially in the distance events, appear genuinely wide open.

So where to begin? The two fastest male milers in NCAA history have scratched the event to contest the 3000m-DMR double instead, so maybe the 3k is a good place to startl. Neither UNC’s Ethan Strand nor Virginia’s Gary Martin have won an NCAA title, but they’ve both spent much of the winter taking cracks at various middle-distance records. Strand got the better of Martin in the 5000m at ACCs, beating his rival by four seconds and notching a meet-record 13:26.60, but Martin came back the next day with a meet record of his own in the 3000m of 7:36.69 (Strand didn’t contest the double). 

But even with two sub-3:50 milers testing their mettle, it’s entirely possible someone else comes out on top. Strand’s training partner and reigning outdoor 5000m champ Parker Wolfe, NCAA XC fourth-place finisher Yaseen Abdalla of Arkansas, and Villanova’s Liam Murphy could all factor into a “surprise” victory—which wouldn’t be totally surprising for close observers. Each member of this quintet is heading into the race with personal bests lower than the previous collegiate record of 7:36.42.

The women’s 3000m has been just as groundbreaking this season, as the minimum qualifying mark is five seconds faster than last year’s and nine of the fourteen fastest women of all time ran their PBs this year. BYU’s Lexy Halladay-Lowry tops the entry list, but the field is also full of historically fast milers with lethal kicks including NCAA record holder Silan Ayyildiz of Oregon, Margot Appleton of Virginia, and Halladay-Lowry’s own teammate Riley Chamberlain. If this one comes down to a kick, the final lap could see serious chaos, but Appleton and Ayyildiz may be a bit tired assuming they make the mile final an hour earlier.

The men’s 5000m begs the timeless question: do you bet on strength or speed? Abdalla and Murphy are two very different runners going head to head in the 25-lapper. Abdalla is a newly minted Paris Olympian and 2:11 marathoner while Murphy is a 1500m Olympic Trials finalist and the poster child for a strong finishing kick. But favorite status may belong instead to another strength-based runner, Habtom Samuel of New Mexico, who no longer needs to worry about finishing behind Graham Blanks (who’s still technically the national leader despite going pro with New Balance in December). If Samuel doesn’t fall 900m from the finish or lose a spike mid-race, we’re optimistic about his chances. But despite his 10,000m title and cross country strength, Samuel has only finished sixth and fourth in NCAA 5000m finals, so he can’t be considered a lock.

While the betting stakes are high in the majority of distance events, odds are a little less malleable in the women’s 5000m. Alabama’s Doris Lemngole is one of three women to dip below the 15:00 mark this year and hasn’t lost to another collegian all season. With NCAA cross country and steeplechase titles already on her trophy shelf, she’s got the resume and knows a thing or two about championship racing across a variety of events. But we wouldn’t count out Florida’s Hilda Olememoi, the third-fastest woman in collegiate history—yet only the second-fastest Gator—or Halladay-Lowry, who’s boosted her national profile this school year with a 14th-place finish at cross nationals and the third-fastest NCAA 3000m on any sized track after going 8:40.60 at UW. We’re also curious to see indoor rookie Paityn Noe of Arkansas, who practically paced herself to a 15:11.27 at the SEC Championships just two weeks ago. It’s scary to think about what that means for her potential in this event in a more saturated race. 

To close out the distance events, we’d be doing our readers a disservice if we forgot to mention the distance medley relay in the one championship where it gets the spotlight it deserves. A mere 0.09 seconds separates the Washington and Virginia men’s squads. The current purple oversized asterisk next to the Huskies’ all-conditions, all-time leading mark might serve as an added chip on UW’s collective shoulder to take the official collegiate record from the Cavaliers in the final hurrah we will see in this event indoors in 2025. And somehow, the DMR on the women’s side has been even better this winter. The UW Husky Classic saw the five fastest times in collegiate history run in the same race… that is until Oregon established the official collegiate record at BU a week later.

A mere six hundredths of a second separates every qualifier in the men’s 60 meter dash, and with the departure of defending champ Terrence Jones last year, there’s no clear heir apparent. Auburn’s dynamic duo of Kanyinsola Ajayi and Israel Okon are tied for the top seed at 6.51, but they both lost to Arkansas’s Jordan Anthony at SECs. Anthony has raced sparingly this year—SECs was actually his first 60m final and only third weekend of racing—so we don’t have a ton of data points, but he did fail to make the final at NCAAs last year so he’s no lock. The favorite might actually be Big Ten champ JC Stevenson, which is crazy because the reigning NCAA outdoor long jump champ has never actually contested an individual track event at NCAAs. Stevenson ran the fastest time in the country in January at Texas Tech, which funnily enough doesn’t make him the top seed as his 6.50 gets bumped back to 6.52 due to the university’s 3200 feet of altitude.

Not every event is closely contested, however, thanks to South Carolina’s Jameesia Ford, who has owned the 200m all season and is back to defend the title she won as a freshman. She’s run three of six fastest 200m times in the nation this year and has once again produced impressive leg after impressive leg for the Gamecocks’ 4x400m. If she takes the win, she’ll become the sixth woman in NCAA history to win two indoor one-lap titles. In the weight throw Wyoming’s Daniel Reynolds, only the second collegian to break the 25 meter barrier and the first in a decade, will attempt to hold off two other entrants on the top-10 list in Ryan Johnson and Trey Knight.

USC’s Johnny Brackins has only lost one 60m hurdles race all year, but it’s an understandable one: he finished third at U.S. indoors in a mostly-professional field. When collegiate competition is all he faces, Brackins is pretty unstoppable and won the Big Ten title by 0.16 seconds, a ridiculous margin of victory in a deep conference and such a short event.

The pole vault will almost certainly be won by a Moll, but which twin is the bigger question: Amanda and Hana Moll of Washington have 9 cm of security on the rest of the country and 6 cm on the rest of NCAA history. Amanda’s incredible 4.91m performance from the Big Ten Championships will be hard to top if she can replicate it, but if she falters, Hana is not too far behind.

The NCAA championships are always one of the more exciting weekends on the entire track and field calendar, but the fact that so many events are truly a tossup will make this an exciting and unpredictable weekend. And in one of the few major meets with a hotly-contested team score component, the potential for huge point swings in events where a similar performance could get you second or eighth will add a layer of unpredictability with serious ramifications for teams like USC, Florida, and Arkansas. This year of all years, you won’t want to miss it.

Severance In The Short Sprints ✂️

If you’re one of the four or five people in the world who hasn’t become totally hooked on Ben Stiller’s thrilling TV dramedy Severance, here’s a quick, spoiler-free primer on the premise: in a sci-fi alternate reality, a procedure exists called “severance” that allows people to partition their work and home brains into two different entities, an “innie” persona and an “outie.”

Track and field hasn’t yet perfected this procedure, so for better or worse we’re stuck with sports stars whose off-the-track antics are deeply intertwined with their athletic careers. And conventional wisdom suggests that indoor track performances (assuming you actually compete indoors) are decent indicators of outdoor potential.

Let’s approach the following few paragraphs through the lens of this conventional wisdom.

The 60- and 100-meter dashes and their hurdles equivalents aren’t the same event, but they’re about as closely interrelated as two distances can be. The lack of a 100-meter dash indoors means that the straightaway sprints are where short sprinters are forced to meet for battle, much to the chagrin of “short” sprinters whose specialty is really the 200m. Given that World Indoors doesn’t quite carry the same prestige of its outdoor sibling, one of the common pastimes for sprint observers is to evaluate athletes’ 60m performances as a means of projecting improvements over 100m outdoors.

The most dramatic example of this is, of course, Noah Lyles’s ascent to the top of the 100-meter podium. It’s old news by now, but Lyles’s no-brainer solution to having unmatched top-end speed and an unremarkable start was to spend years honing the latter, eventually culminating in a 0.14-second improvement in the 60m and a World Indoor silver. More importantly, it also directly contributed to his transformation from 200-meter runner who couldn’t make multiple U.S. teams in the 100m to World and Olympic titles in the latter.

But is conventional wisdom generally correct here? Does your innie’s 60-meter season translate directly to your outie’s summer success, or are the two events more distinct than we give them credit for?

There are a few ways to look at this. First, the simplest: does winning medals indoors mean you’ll win them outdoors too? Of the twelve World Indoor medalists over 60m/60H, only four picked up outdoor medals: Lyles, Julien Alfred, Grant Holloway, and Cyréna Samba-Mayela. Part of that is selection bias: of the Paris medalists, five skipped the indoor season entirely and another two (Fred Kerley and Rasheed Broadbell) only raced once. So the easiest conclusion to draw is that the indoor/outdoor severance is less about different skill sets and more about different pools of competition.

But Samba-Mayela’s 2024 season offers something to consider. The 24-year-old was certainly not a household name heading into the year, despite being the 2022 World Indoor champion in the 60m hurdles. Yet she came out a national hero with her Olympic silver in front of a home crowd in Paris and a European title, the first two international medals outdoors of her career. Though she took a step down the podium in Glasgow, she improved her PB from 7.78 to 7.73, as well as her consistency (she’d only broken 7.80 once in her career prior to last year).

Samba-Mayela’s incremental improvements indoors clearly helped create momentum for a breakthrough outdoors, but that system doesn’t work for everyone. For better or worse, Devynne Charlton may be the poster child for 60 meter severance. The reigning indoor champ went on an absolute tear last year, one that included two world records and five wins in six races. Charlton is the only woman in history to break 7.70 on multiple occasions, and she did it three times last year! But she’s never finished higher than fourth in a global final outdoors.

In fact, only two of the ten fastest female 60m hurdles of all time have global medals outdoors. On the other hand, all ten of the fastest men have global medals and five of them are Olympic champions. Of the four world record holders over 60m/60H, two (Holloway and 60m record holder Irina Privalova) have Olympic titles, although Privalova’s is weirdly in the 400m hurdles and not the 100m, where she’s only got a bronze. Like Charlton, Christian Coleman is inarguably better at the 60m than the 100m, holding the world record and two World Indoor titles, although with a 2019 100m title to his name it’s hard to argue the gap is as wide.

The athletes who truly appear to be “severed” tend to be the ones where the 60 meters happens to be their best event: the biggest weapons in their arsenal are preternatural starting ability and acceleration, so the event where the start takes up the highest percentage of the overall race is going to be their strength. But it’s not an insurmountable barrier. Holloway and Alfred are two examples of athletes who are untouchable over 60 meters, but they’re both so good at getting out hard that they can make it all the way down the homestretch in first.

The ones who tend to suffer most from the switch tend to be the ones who can make finals but not always podium: your Ewa Swobodas, your Aleia Hobbses, your Ackeem Blakes. It’ll be interesting to keep an eye on Denisha Cartwright and Ditaji Kambundji’s outies in the hurdles later this season. Both are coming off strong indoor campaigns but have yet to truly break through on the international level. Whether this year is the year they successfully translate the gains remains to be seen.

Much like its television equivalent, indoor/outdoor severance is an imperfect procedure that doesn’t seem to affect athletes in any uniform way. Rather than generating any hard scientific conclusion, indoor times are a bit of a Rorschach test: what you see says more about the subject than the result.

More News From The Track And Field World 📰

– In pretty devastating news to the whole concept of American-hosted World Athletics events, this summer’s World Road Running Championships will no longer take place in San Diego. The reasoning appears to be funding and sponsorship related, although nothing specific has been released. The event will take place later in the year, at a to-be-announced location, apparently.

– NEVERTHELESS! The show must go on (at said to-be-announced location), and Oklahoma State Alum-turned Puma pros-turned-U.S. Half Marathon champions Taylor Roe and Alex Maier each appeared on the CITIUS MAG Podcast following their qualification for Team USA.

– ​​Sheila Chepkirui of Kenya broke the tape against a solid field at the Nagoya Women's Marathon in 2:20:40. Back in seventh, American Natosha Rogers enjoyed a nice little marathon breakthrough, finishing in 2:23:51.

– At the Lisbon Half Marathon Djibouti’s Abdi Waiss won in 59:44 and led four other men under 60:00. Meanwhile, Tsigie Gebreselama (1:04:21) took top honors in the women’s race by almost two minutes! Marathon world record holder Ruth Chepngetich—who came down with a case of malaria in January—was the headliner for the women’s field, but struggled to a second place 1:06:20 showing.

– In an incredible “gotta see it to believe it” moment, Kiwis Sam Tanner and Sam Ruthe, the latter of whom is only 15 years old, tied for their country’s national title in the 1500m. Normally, going down to the thousandth of a second would yield a winner, but in this instance, the photo finish could not determine who was ahead and both Sams were credited with a 3:44.31 first-place finish.

– Speaking of talented teenagers, Texas high schooler and University of Georgia commit Brayden Williams ran a wind-aided 9.99 100m (+2.6m/s) at the Bluebonnet Invitational while celebrating across the finish line.

– It appears, based on the World Athletics Road to Nanjing portal, that Jamaican sprint stars Kishane Thompson and Tia Clayton won’t be at World Indoors after all, and nor will U.S. champion Jacious Sears. A bummer for the fans, but great news for Ronnie Baker and Zaynab Dosso.

– sigh In the latest episode of the seemingly endless Noah Lyles-Tyreek Hill narrative, Lyles announced over the weekend that the duo will match up in a 60-meter dash sometime this year.

– After a scary fall in the 3000m final at European Indoors, it was a relief to see Dutch distance runner Maureen Koster report that she is doing better and only suffered a mild concussion and some bruising.

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