All The World's A Relay ⏱️

Sponsored by Grand Slam Track: Philly

This isn’t your average track meet. This is Grand Slam Track™ — where legends are made, the best of the best compete and the stakes are sky-high.

After a sellout crowd in Miami and $100,000 awarded to each Slam Champion, the league now heads to one of the most iconic stages in American track: Franklin Field in Philadelphia, May 30 through June 1. We’re talking Olympic gold medalists in action like Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone, Cole Hocker, Masai Russell and Gabby Thomas.

The last two Slams brought: World leads. National records. Emotional moments you can’t script. The energy is electric. The intimacy of Franklin Field? Unmatched. You’re not just watching greatness — you’re part of it.

🎟️ Grab your tickets now at grandslamtrack.com/events and witness it all packed into one unforgettable weekend.

Compiled by David Melly and Paul Snyder

World Relays Delivers The Heat… Qualifying Heats, That Is. 🥴

Did you know there was a World Championship this weekend?

Well, sorta. It’s hard to say these days whether World Relays counts as a standalone global championship event or a qualifying event for the actual championship in Tokyo later this year. There are medals handed out, sure, but most events that aren’t featured at outdoor World Champs have been cut out of the program, and the branding of the event has been retooled to focus on the notion that the top 14 teams earn spots in spots to compete for a different set of medals this fall.

Does winning the 4x100m at this event make you a World Champion? If so, are you the reigning World champ for only four months? Are we really supposed to be explaining to casuals that a “World Relays champion” and a “World champion relay” are two entirely different things?

It’s not a great sign that World Athletics itself felt the need to publish an elaborate flow chart describing the qualifying system baked into the meet. And it doesn’t make for a particularly linear television narrative when the teams all race on Day 1, some of them qualify for Worlds but still race on Day 2 for medals, the others race a different race on Day 2, where your performance also can qualify you for Worlds but doesn’t win you medals.

There is up to $40,000 of prize money on offer for the win, but when that gets divided 4-7 ways and you have to travel halfway around the world, you can understand why a lot of top Americans and Europeans didn’t bother. Of the 16 Olympic medalists over 100m, 200m, and 400m from Paris, only three: Kishane Thompson, Kenny Bednarek, and Natalia Bukowiecka (née Kaczmarek) made the trip to Guangzhao.

For poor Kishane Thompson, no good deed went unpunished. Thompson went all the way to China to do a lot of standing around, as exchange woes struck not once, but twice on the second handoff of the men’s 4x100m, meaning Thompson—slated to anchor both days—never got a chance to properly represent his country. And now, he may be watching the Tokyo 4x100m final from the stands, as Jamaica doesn’t currently have a qualifier and currently sits at 30th on the descending order list within the qualifying period. So catch a Jamaican all-star team competing at [meet to be determined] later this summer!

Of all the nations entered in this meet, Jamaica is probably the least karmically deserving of their poor outcomes as they actually sent several of their biggest stars, most notably Shelly-Ann Fraser-Pryce, Shericka Jackson, Yohan Blake, and Thompson. At least the women picked up a bronze medal, but a team that consists of the third and fifth fastest 100-meter runners in history getting beaten outright by Great Britain and Spain has to be considered an underachiever.

Spain, on the other hand, has to be heading back west feeling pretty darn bueno. Despite having never medaled in a relay at either the Olympics or World Championships, the women picked up a victory in the women’s 4x400m and silver in the 4x100m. Paula Sevilla, the 400m bronze medalist at this year’s European Indoors, raced four times across both events last weekend, and her hard work paid off. Spain is one of the few countries that features relays at its national championships, and Sevilla has six national titles in the 4x100m… seems like there may be a lesson for other nations to learn here.

One team that certainly left the meet satisfied is South Africa. The federation won the men’s 4x100m and 4x400m, alongside a bronze in the women’s 4x400m in national-record time. Together with a fifth-place finish in the mixed 4x400m, South Africans qualified for Worlds in every event they contested. The hero of the weekend had to be Akani Simbine, who ran away from Olympic champ Andre De Grasse and ran down American Brandon Hicklin to anchor his team to a 37.61 world leading time. That’s just 0.04 seconds off the team’s silver-medal performance at last summer’s Olympics (featuring three of the same four legs), which in turn was only 0.07 seconds off the Canadians’ gold-medal performance.

Simbine’s run in Guangzhou continues what could be a breakout season for the 31-year-old. One year ago, Simbine had never won a medal on a global stage and was riding an unfortunate string of near misses in 100-meter finals. Over the past 12 months he’s picked up an Olympic silver in the 4x100m and a bronze at World Indoors in the 60m, and now a questionably-legitimate gold medal on a world stage of sorts. He’s also three-for-three so far this outdoor season in 100ms, including a world-leading 9.90 into a headwind in Botswana back in April. Racing early and often has worked so far for the sprinter, whose trip to China included two Diamond League victories as well.

Smaller countries end up necessarily more dependent on their few big stars, and as such, teams like the Netherlands and Botswana felt the absence of their 400m studs. But others, like Great Britain, made do without Daryll Neita or Dina Asher-Smith and still brought home some hardware in the sprints. It’s hard to know exactly how much emphasis each federation put into their selection and preparation. So it’s also hard to say that the countries that scraped together a winning foursome simply cared more, but when a nation doesn’t field its best team and then underperforms, it’s hard to feel sympathy.

And then we come to the red, white, and blue elephant in the room. Team USA started off its World-Relays weekend in the worst possible form, with a botched exchange in its first-ever mixed 4x100m relay. They weren’t alone, as three of the 14 entrants in the debut event had trouble getting the stick around. The men’s 4x100m and women’s 4x400m fared better, with a pair of silver medals, but American women have won seven of the last eight global titles in the latter event, so anything less than gold feels like a letdown.

Despite riding a three-gold streak in the women’s 4x100m, the absence of Sha’Carri Richardson on anchor was badly felt as Tee Tee Terry could only carry the team to a fourth place run. And the nation that featured the Olympic men’s 400m champ, the Olympic 400H champ, and the three fastest times in the world this year somehow couldn’t make the final in the men’s 4x400m. They’ll have a chance at redemption in Tokyo, as the quartet in the repechage round clocked a 2:58.68, but even if they’d run that time in the official final, they’d have finished fourth.

The one bright light in a very dim weekend for Team USA was a win in the mixed 4x400m, thanks in large part to Lynna Irby-Jackson’s 49.53 anchor split. U.S. teams have now posted five of the nine fastest marks ever run in the still-young event, but the absence of Femke Bol and Marileidy Paulino on the anchor leg has to be considered for context. Still, on a weekend where nothing quite went right for the Americans, simply coming home with something to brag about is worth a little praise.

The star power of Team USA at its best is a double-edged sword in the relays: it virtually guarantees gold when everyone shows up and performs, but it can also make the events—especially in the 4x400ms—a little boring if the conclusion is foregone. But we got a peek into what a Lyles/Richardson/McLaughlin/Benjamin-less relay squad looks like this weekend and it wasn’t exactly inspiring. Surely, even the other teams in the race would rather a proper defeat of the country’s best and brightest than a Pyrrhic victory over a C-squad?

To be clear, this isn’t a knock on the athletes who competed. They showed up to an event where their nation needed them to perform and tried their hardest. The blame here falls on World Athletics, who can’t quite seem to decide what this meet means or entice stars to show up, and to a lesser extent, the federations themselves with gold-medal potential who don’t send the teams to back it up.

Team USA successfully secured a spot on the starting line at the World Championships in all five relays that will be contested. At the end of the day, if WA treats World Relays like a qualifier, that’s how countries will approach it as well. When it comes to the dessert on offer at World Relays, you can’t have your medal and eat it too.

Five Questions On Tap For The Doha DL 🤔

Now that the World Relays-induced pause in professional races is behind us, it’s back to regularly-scheduled programming on the Diamond League circuit. So if you don’t have lunch plans on Friday, May 16, fire up your laptop, pay your hefty subscription fee, and tune in to the Doha Grand Prix to see what your favorite track and fieldsters have been up to.

Now that we’re officially in the mid-early-mid-spring season, every sub-par performance can’t be entirely written off as a rust buster and every strong run isn’t necessarily a sign of early fitness that will be useless later in the summer. 

Heading into Doha (to paraphrase Kelly Kapoor), we have a lot of questions. Here are a few of the biggest ones:

Does the Pocket Rocket still have a full tank of jet fuel?

We’ve said it before in this newsletter, but it bears repeating: Shelly-Ann Fraser-Pryce and Usain Bolt are the same age. It’s not impossible to continue sprinting at the top of your game into your late 30s—just ask fellow Jamaican Merlene Ottey—but it’s far from common. And so seeing SAFP bounce back from season-ending injuries in 2024 and open up her 2025 campaign with a wind-aided 10.94 100m win was an encouraging sign for Jamaican sprint fans who, frankly, haven’t had a lot to cheer about lately.

The 38-year-old, now nicknamed the “Mommy Rocket,” is the biggest headliner in the meet, lining up against three of her countrywomen and a handful of Europeans. It’ll be interesting to use Mujinga Kambundji as a frame of reference, as the Swiss sprinter is coming off a World Indoor title over 60 meters and should give SAFP a strong challenge in the first half of the race. Fraser-Pryce rarely, if ever, toes the start line of a race she’s not ready to win, so her mere appearance in Doha should be a sign that she’s healthy and fit, but it’ll be interesting to see just how hard she has to work to take down the field.

Can Letsile Tebogo pick up the pace?

Letsile Tebogo and Shelly-Ann Fraser-Pryce may be as different as two Olympic champions can get, given that Tebogo is 17 years younger, races far more frequently and across a wide range of distances, and so far in 2025 has… not exactly impressed. Tebogo has notched only three wins in eight races so far in 2025, but hopefully his first DL appearance in his strongest event, the 200m, should start to even the score. With his strongest threat coming from American Courtney Lindsey, who’s run 19.71 but only finished sixth at last year’s Olympic Trials, anything less than a win here for Tebogo would be a serious concern.

This time last year, Tebogo had season’s bests of 10.13, 19.71 (wind-aided), and 44.29, compared to 10.03, 20.23, and 45.26 in 2025. Now, the Olympic hangover is real and it’s entirely possible to read Tebogo’s early season run as repeatedly venturing outside his comfort zone in a heavy training block, but at a certain point, the times have to start coming or things start looking more uncomfortable for the 21-year-old star.

Will we see a world record in Yavi’s season opener?

Few athletes had a better August last year than Winfred Yavi, the Bahraini steeplechaser who picked up Olympic gold and the #2 all-time mark in the event only three weeks apart. The latter performance was particularly eye-popping, as Yavi did a lot of solo running to come within a tenth of a second of Beatrice Chepkoech’s 8:44.32 world record. Given that Yavi has now run the second, fourth, and sixth fastest time in history and that in two of those performances she beat the third- and fifth-fastest marks head-to-head, it feels like a foregone conclusion that the 25-year-old has the capacity to break the mark.

But it’s not get ahead of ourselves: while Yavi is an incredible late-summer performer, she only opened up her season in 9:21.62 last year. She has run well at this meet in the past, winning in 2023 and finishing third in a then-PB of 9:02.64 in 2021, but the meet record is only 9:00.12 for a reason—it’s hard to run a fast steeplechase early. But if anyone can do it, Yavi can.

Will anyone throw the men’s discus 70 meters outside of Oklahoma?

The top 11 discus throwers in the world in 2025 have one thing in common: they recorded their best mark of the season in Ramona, Oklahoma. The vaunted Millican Field has yielded 11 of the 13 performances over 70 meters on record so far this season, the only exceptions being world record holder Mykolas Alekna’s throws at his UC Berkeley home meets.

With Alekna absent (presumably in pursuit of an Atlantic Coast Conference title for the Cal Bears, the irony of which cannot be overstated), the odds of a 70+ meter winning throw are way lower, despite having eight names on the start list with PBs north of the barrier. Olympic bronze medalist Matty Denny won four straight competitions to open his season before falling to Alekna, but he’ll nevertheless have his hands full with 2022 World champ Kristjan Čeh and 2023 World champ Daniel Ståhl in the mix.

How does the women’s pole vault pecking order shake out these days?

Can an event be both top-heavy with talent and wide-open? If so, the women’s pole vault certainly fits the bill. A different athlete has won 2023 Worlds, 2024 World Indoors, the 2024 Olympics, and 2025 World Indoors. Four entrants in Doha have personal bests between 4.92m and 5.00m. And the top-ranked athlete in the field is none of those; it’s Canadian Alysha Newman, the current World No. 2.

Katie Moon and Sandi Morris will once again do battle here, and while this is Moon’s outdoor season opener, she probably heads in the favorite as she had an incredibly consistent indoor season, going undefeated in four competitions with winning marks 4.80m or better each time out (plus her seventh U.S. title). But with Brit Molly Caudery, Kiwi Eliza McCartney, and Slovenian Tina Šutej in the field, an American victory is far from guaranteed. It’s a shame the DL isn’t better at broadcasting entire field event competitions, because every height will be a battle with this caliber of entrants.

May certainly isn’t the part of the track season that matters most, but it’s the time when results start to matter more. And with two more DL meets following in quick succession plus a Grand Slam meet only two weeks away, the pro track scene is going to offer a much clearer picture of who’s on top and who’s got work to do by the time the calendar flips to June.

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What Makes For A Truly Memorable Regular Season Race? 📺

A quick, unscientific crunch of the data suggests that of the 220 issues of The Lap Count we’ve used the word “stakes” in about 15% of them. As a newsletter prone to harping on marginal ways to improve the popularity of track and field, that shouldn’t come as a surprise. Given that track and field lacks conventional Sportscenter highlight offerings like “slam dunks,” “home runs,” and “career-ending, helmet-to-helmet spear tackles,” we’re often turning to stakes in these discussions on boosting the sport’s profile.

Is so-and-so the fastest woman on earth?

Will what’s-his-name finally win that global medal against a historically great field?

Can who’s-it, perennially in the shadow of her arch rival, finally steal one from her?

Wow, that unnamed, hypothetical Swedish pole-vaulter sure looks like he’ll break the WR again!

The stakes are inherently high in each of these scenarios. Either a world record is in the cards, and thus, a mark on the permanent historic register of track and field, or we’re talking about a gold medal coronation at the World Championship or Olympics. 

But as we often repeat—in considerably more than 20% of our newsletters—most of the sport takes place outside of these few special weeks each year. And we are pretty damn adamant that track and field, in any format, can be supremely entertaining. To illustrate that point, we’ve outlined four non-major championship, non-world-record-implicated race types, with examples plucked from the annals of YouTube, that are frankly, cool as hell.

The Upset: Justin Gatlin vs. Usain Bolt at the Rome Diamond League (2013) 

Usain Bolt was coming off a hamstring strain that hampered his preparation for much of the season. Justin Gatlin had been back a while from his 2006 doping ban, and was accustomed to a chorus of boos whenever he lowered himself into the blocks. They also just happened to be the two best 100m sprinters in the world, with a considerable edge to Bolt in their head-to-head battles, historically. What this all meant, was that this matchup slotted neatly into many fans’ notions of “good versus evil,” with an assumption that as was often the case, “good” would prevail.

The race itself packed plenty of drama into 10 seconds. The gun sounds, and Bolt—not known for his start—launches out of the blocks rather well. He’s about even with Gatlin, who was likely banking on getting a quick lead in the opening meters of the race. But rather than inch away from Gatlin, Bolt lumbers along, lacking his typical acceleration. Gatlin capitalizes, squeezes past the greatest 100m runner in human history, and breaks the tape. All eyes and cameras turn to Bolt. We can assume Gatlin is off celebrating. But it’s Bolt in defeat that’s the lingering image from this race. Nothing in sport is more captivating than the reminder that even the GOAT is occasionally human. And nothing is more compelling in archetype than the “villain” pulling one over on the “hero.”

The “Huh?!”: Rabbit Tom Byers holds on to win in Oslo, 1981

If there’s one knock on distance events that we’ll concede as generally true, it’s that even with a wide range of possible outcomes in each event, it can feel like there’s only a handful of possible ways they’ll play out. So when things do unfold unpredictably, with confusing tactics on display, and the final outcome in question until the final steps of the race… yeah, that’s the truly good stuff.

In 1981, historically underrated American miler Tom Byers was tasked with rabbiting an all-time elite field headlined by Steve Ovett. Byers did his job. But the field let him go almost immediately, turning it into a slowed-down slugfest between the established field. Byers never dropped out, and hit the bell a full ten seconds up on Ovett and co. (Covette?). Despite looking like he was hefting a piano on his back, and Ovett closing the ultimate 400m nine full seconds faster than him, Byers held on for one weird-ass win that’s still talked about to this day.

The Controversy: Providence drops the baton (or was it knocked out?) at Penn (2024)

At an imaginary sports bar in Providence, Rhode Island, grizzled old track heads congregate every Saturday around noon to pickle themselves and gripe about past sporting injustices that befell their beloved Friars. Today’s topic of carping? “The nudge.” Did Washington’s Penn Relays 4x800m squad take “rubbing is racing” a step too far on the homestretch back in 2024? Or was it fair play? The officials didn’t say “foul.” But where’s the fun in accepting that outcome? One of the best parts of being a sports fan is relitigating moments like this. 

The baton—dropped or bumped, your call—hitting the track, resulting in a DQ for Providence squad, is one of the few minor blemishes on the team’s recent record at Penn. Had they held on and still broken the tape, are we talking about an all-time dynasty instead of only a very, very good team? This sort of discussion is how sports media mainstays like Bill Simmons butters his bread, and for good reason—it allows us to identify and dwell on the tiny little inflection points in sport that ultimately prove monumental.

The Meme: Heather Kampf (née Dorniden) falls, still wins 600m at Big Tens (2008)

Two points of clarification: By “meme,” we simply mean a race that’s reached escape velocity and wound up on mainstream news shows, on your conspiracy theorist uncle’s Facebook feed, or on sales development rep training slides about perseverance. That sort of thing. And no shots at the Big Ten Indoor Championships, but it’s not quite the Olympics, so we’re counting this race as “regular season.”

Okay, all that said, watch the above-linked footage of the race, helpfully labeled as including “no cheesy music or titles” and try not to get chills. It’s just a pure demonstration of guts, on top of being the sort of race where even if you know the outcome, until Dorniden/Kampf crosses first, you don’t quite believe how she can. Not all great track and field moments can become shorthand for a set of intangible personal attributes that hiring managers love, but when it happens—woo boy, it really is powerful.

More News From The Track And Field World 📰

– Running USA is running its annual Global Runner Survey and wants your input! It shouldn’t take more than a few minutes to complete and there are cool prizes for people who do, like marathon entries and a $5,000 treadmill giveaway. 

– Clayton Murphy, the 2016 Olympic bronze medalist in the 800m, has retired from professional track and field. The Ohio native also repped Team USA at the 2020 games, was the U.S. 800m champion three times, the indoor 1000m champ twice, won a Pan Am Games title as well as a World Relays (back when they had distance events), and holds a lifetime PB of 1:42.93.

– It was an eventful day at Sunday’s USATF 25k Championships in Grand Rapids, Michigan, as Carrie Ellwood (1:22:27; 5:18/mile pace) and Casey Clinger (1:12:17; 4:39/mile pace) both set new American records for the distance.

– Let us take a moment to tap the “Pros Should Only Be Allowed To Race At Pro Meets” sign hanging above our desk. At a very, very low key meet with a very, very funny name (the “Very, Very Last Chance” meet, hosted by Cal State, Los Angeles), 2x 2020 Olympic gold medalist Athing Mu-Nikolayev finished her first race of 2025, a 1500m with a three-person field in 4:21.18.

– At Mutaz Barshim’s Whatgravity Challenge—a high jump-only competition with elite fields in Qatar—Sanghyeok Woo cleared 2.29m to best the men’s field, while Yaroslava Mahuchikh got over 2.02m to take down Eleanor Patterson and company.

– Eritrea’s Berhane Tesfay (2:08:25) and Kenya’s Sharon Kiptugen (2:23:19) took home the titles at the Copenhagen Marathon.

– In a rare instance of ultrarunning getting a tiny bit of attention from the regular person world, the Cocodona 250, a 250ish-mile footrace from just north of Phoenix all the way up to Flagstaff, Arizona—made a splash for well, being super long, providing 125 hours of live coverage, its stunning scenery, and the fact that it looked for a minute like Courtney Dauwalter might win the thing outright. Ultimately, she dropped out before halfway, and Rachel Entrekin (63:50:55) and Dan Green (58:47:18) won the women’s and men’s races, respectively.

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