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Compiled by David Melly and Paul Snyder

The Theme Of 2025 So Far: Expect The Unexpected 🤷‍♂️

There was a whole lotta track and field around the world this weekend. From Rabat to Los Angeles, from Miami to Zagreb, it seemed like every notable athlete in the world toed a start line or stepped into the infield.

If one theme tied them all together, it was that nothing quite went as expected. The favorites underwhelmed and the underdogs overperformed. Athletes announced themselves as contenders in new events and journeymen made huge leaps forward. Track and field can feel boring when there’s one dominant performer running rampant over the competition week in and week out… but this was no boring week in the track world.

There were so many crazy outcomes this week, it’ll be tough to capture them all, but here are a few of the most eye-opening:

Jonah Koech enters the chat.

Five Americans won Diamond League events in Morocco this weekend, a firm rebuttal to the narrative that the Grand Slam schedule would suck up all the domestic talent. Jacory Patterson continued his Cinderella-story start to 2025 with a 44.37 victory in the 400m over the likes of Quincy Hall and Bayapo Ndori, the latter of whom pulled up with an apparent injury after the first turn. Courtney Lindsey (200m) and Katie Moon (pole vault) bounced back from runner-up finishes in Doha with wins in Rabat. But the biggest story of the meet was perhaps Jonah Koech’s meet-record 3:31.43 win in the 1500m, a seven-second personal best and the fastest mark by an American so far this season.

Koech is one of those guys who’s been around for a long time but never quite broken through to international renown, starting his NCAA career at UTEP (later Texas Tech) and switching allegiance from Kenya to the U.S. in 2021. Koech ran 1:46.23 in the 800m in college and thrice made an NCAA final but never finished higher than sixth. He made his first global championship in 2022 with a runner-up finish in the 800m at USAs, but got DQed in the first round at Worlds. After an injury-shortened 2023, he came back for a fifth-place finish at Olympic Trials, also in the 800m, but nothing before Saturday indicated that a huge jump forward in the 1500m was imminent.

Koech didn’t just get dragged to a new PB in the middle of a large pack of sub-3:30 performers: he kicked to a decisive victory over a strong international field. Before Sunday, it was tempting to view the U.S. 1500m team as a foregone conclusion with Cole Hocker, Yared Nuguse, and Hobbs Kessler locking down the top three spots. That’s still the most likely outcome, given that the trio all finished in the top five of the Olympic final and Nuguse is the eldest of the three at 25 years old, but perhaps the pecking order isn’t entirely set in stone if Koech can continue his form into the summer.

The Track Fest 1500m produces more questions than answers.

On the women’s side, the U.S. 1500m scene is far from settled and remains top-heavy with talent. Until proven otherwise, Nikki Hiltz remains the top dog, but given that eight athletes broke four minutes last year, the competition at USAs will be brutal. Strangely, however, two of the most talented American middle-distance runners both logged middling performances in LA, with Shelby Houlihan finishing fifth in the fast heat in 4:04.76 and Athing Mu getting outkicked in heat 3 by BYU alum Sadie Sargent. It’s harder than ever to get a true sense of Mu’s fitness and plans as she takes the world’s-most-roundabout path back to the 800m, so the jury’s still out until she returns to her primary event at the Prefontaine Classic (if not before). What is crystal clear is that Houlihan’s path toward another U.S. 1500m team is going to be tough if she’s in anything less than PB shape by the time the championships roll around.

Elise Thorner and Frederik Ruppert have themselves a day.

Unless you’re a diehard fan of the European steeplechase scene, you’ve probably never heard the names Elise Thorner and Frederick Ruppert before this weekend. That’s because they were the 49th and 29th fastest steeplers in the world in 2024, respectively, and neither has made a global final in the event. But Thorner won the Sound Running meet in an 11-second PB of 9:17.57 and Ruppert, halfway around the world, knocked 13 seconds off his own lifetime best to finish second in Rabat only a few steps behind Olympic champ Soufiane El Bakkali. 

Ruppert finished fourth in the European championship last year, but nothing on his resume to date suggested he was capable of his breakthrough 8:01.49 run. Similarly to Kenneth Rooks’s silver-medal performance in Paris, he’s now jumped from also-ran to true medal contender, and given that El Bakkali hasn’t looked fantastic so far this season and world record holder Lamecha Girma is still working his way back from the concussion he sustained in Paris, medals in Tokyo are definitely up for grabs in one of the sport’s more unpredictable events.

You better learn how to spell “Tshepiso Masalela.”

Even as Letsile Tebogo continues his slow start to 2025, the Botswana athletics machine has rolled like a freight train toward the top of pretty much every track event from 1500m on down. The fastest man in the world this outdoor season at both 800m and 1500m is 26-year-old Tshepiso Masalela, who took down Emmanuel Wanyonyi and a crowded 800m field in Rabat to clock a 1:42.70 PB and his fifth win in six races. 

Masalela has made the last two global 800m finals, but this year feels different already. For starters, he’s now won two straight DLs after not finishing higher than third in six attempts last season. And while his focus on the 1500m has been, before now, secondary, the fact that he’d never run under 3:40 before this season and now has run 3:35.26 and 3:30.71 suggests that he could be a podium threat in either distance. Are you listening, GST organizers?

The 100m landscape remains topsy-turvy.

Every day, it seems like there’s a new plot twist in the fast-paced soap opera that is the global 100-meter scene. With Noah Lyles and Sha’Carri Richardson sitting comfortably on automatic entries into Tokyo’s World Championships, we may not see much of them on the racing circuit until later this summer absent a chunky appearance fee. At the other end of the spectrum, perennial almost-medalist Akani Simbine keeps racking up win after win, most recently a DL victory in Rabat over a field that included Fred Kerley, Ferdinand Omanyala, and Letsile Tebogo. And somewhere in between we have a range of results up for interpretation, like Shericka Jackson’s 11.04 victory in Rabat that she didn’t seem too pleased about and Bayanda Walaza’s dominant 9.94 run in Zagreb. Walaza is 19 years old and has only lost one 100m all season, which suggests that South Africa has a legitimate shot to put not one, but two athletes on the podium.

Don’t count out the veterans just yet, however: At a lowkey meet in Florida, Trayvon Bromell and Marie-Josee Ta Lou-Smith made it clear they aren’t handing anything off to the next generation just yet. Bromell only ran the prelims, but he clocked the second-fastest wind-legal performance in the world this year, a 9.91 victory ahead of Puerto Rican Eloy Benitez. Ta Lou-Smith split a pair of races with Jamaican Briana Williams, 13 years her junior, clocking 11.00 ahead of Williams’s 11.10 in the prelims then 11.20 behind Williams’s 11.08 in the final. With each passing weekend, the 100-meter picture only gets more opaque.

Some other familiar names laid down familiar performances last weekend, including Julien Alfred running away from the field to clock a 22.15 200m victory in Zagreb and Femke Bol logging the fastest season opener of her career with a 52.46 400m hurdles in Rabat. You’ve gotta feel a little frustration on behalf of Beatrice Chebet, who ran an astonishing 8:11.56 3000m on the track in Morocco, a time that would be a world record by five seconds were the extremely suspect Chinese performances from 1993 not still on the books. Outside of lingering 1990s record books, right now it seems like the only barrier that could credibly stand in Chebet’s path to world dominance is a possible rematch over 5000m with Faith Kipyegon later this summer.

As of May 28, the question “who’s a lock for gold in Tokyo” has very few correct answers. One could argue the list begins and ends with Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone and Mondo Duplantis—and that’s assuming Sydney runs her primary event, which is far from guaranteed. There are betting favorites and hotly-anticipated openers still to come, but all in all, most of track and field right now is wide-open and hard to predict… which makes it a great time to be a fan of track and field.

Will The Third Grand Slam Give Us Something New? 🤔

After a brief lull in the action, the Grand Slam Track league heads to Franklin Field for its inaugural season’s third meet. Aside from a packed stadium of Eagles fans and warmups along the Schuylkill River, the Philly slam will feel different for a few other reasons, notably that its schedule has been compressed from three days to two, and the 5000m has been cut. The Slampions who persevered in both Kingston and Miami—Kenny Bednarek, Melissa Jefferson-Wooden, Grant Fisher, and Alison dos Santos—will have bigger targets than ever before on their backs, and a new crop of Challengers will look to upset the cash-stuffed apple cart. 

As we prepare for another jam-packed weekend of racing and a whole new crop of Challengers, there are a few key questions on our mind beyond “who goes home with a $100,000 check?”

Does racing only once change the long distance dynamics?

The men’s and women’s distance races have played out a variety of different ways over the last four rounds, but two common themes did emerge: Agnes Ngetich pushing the pace early in the women’s distance races, and Grant Fisher’s lethal kick paying lucrative dividends in the men’s. For Ngetich and Fisher, the assignment doesn’t change much just because they’re racing once, not twice. But for the other Racers and Challengers, the fifth go-round may present an opportunity to take a big swing and try to knock these two champs off their game.

On the men’s side, Franklin Field’s legacy as an incubator of collegiate talent will come full circle as four of the five Challengers—Graham Blanks, Ky Robinson, Nico Young, and Edwin Kurgat—are former NCAA champs. As of right now, none seem likely to give Fisher a true run for his money at any pace, but Kurgat or Hagos Gebrhiwet could make things fast from the gun. On the women’s side, having only one (shorter) race could spur Racers Nozomi Tanaka or Elise Cranny into trying to stay with the leaders longer, but Challengers Ejgayehu Taye, Medina Eisa, and Weini Kelati will likely want an honest pace as much as Ngetich to hopefully thin out the field.

What can Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone run in a flat 100m?

We’ve seen Sydney run the 100m hurdles before. We’ve even seen it on this very track, in fact—she won a 100mH race at Penn Relays in 12.75 in 2022. But SML hasn’t run a flat 100m since April 2018, when she was still rocking Wildcat blue as a freshman at the University of Kentucky. It’s unlikely to change the trajectory of her season or the landscape of the U.S. 100m scene, but Sydney in an 100m is an interesting novelty that will get more than a few curious eyes tuning in. It’s hard to compare apples to apples, but Ackera Nugent won the last short hurdles 100m in Miami in 11.09 and McLaughlin-Levrone did run a wind-aided 11.07 in her last 100m race (seven years ago), so while she’s unlikely to win the flat hurdles, she could contend for the overall Slam title with the help of a strong sprint.

Which HS phenom comes out on top in the men’s short distance?

Two of the more intriguing Challengers on the Philly start list are Hobbs Kessler and Josh Hoey, both entered in the men’s short distance. Kessler seems tailor-made for the format after he became the first American to make both the 800m and 1500m Olympic teams in nearly 50 years last summer, and Hoey is coming off a barn-burner of an indoor season that culminated in a World Indoor title. Kessler and Hoey both came to prominence with historic high school careers over 1500m and 800m, respectively, so it’s somewhat fitting they’re meeting in the middle at a facility known as much for its high school meets over the decades as its professional history.

Will legal winds yield a new 100m favorite?

With all the talk online (and in this newsletter) over the shifting dynamics of the women’s 100m, things may seem a lot less ambiguous if Melissa Jefferson-Wooden can clock a wind-legal time on par with her 10.75w in Miami. Given how strong Jefferson-Wooden has looked in her last two races, she should be able to get well under 11 seconds, which could have her threatening Tia Clayton’s 10.92 world lead. But perhaps no one wants a legal wind reading more than Gabby Thomas, who’s broken 11 seconds seven times but, astonishingly, never with a wind under +2.0 and has an official PB of 11.00.

Is the third time the charm for Nikki Hiltz?

The seven-time U.S. champ isn’t used to finishing second these days, but that’s just what they’ve done in the last two Slams. Across two weekends and four races, Hiltz has performed remarkably consistently, finishing first, third, second, and second in each individual 800m/1500m, but the overall Slam title has evaded them thus far thanks to strong performances from Ethiopians Freweyni Hailu and Diribe Welteji. Hailu is out for Philadelphia, but Welteji is back after missing Miami, and the addition of Olympic bronze medalist Georgia Hunter Bell and her 1:56.28/3:52.61 PBs will make Hiltz’s third attempt at the top prize tougher than ever.

The beauty of a brand-new league is that every new race is an opportunity for something unprecedented. After Philly, three data points may start looking more and more like a trend, but at the halfway point of this series, there’s plenty of time to shake things up. This weekend, we’ll find out who’s locked in, and who’s still got some tricks up their sleeve.

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 31 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.

Do Track Meets Have Too Much Track? 🤪

When Grand Slam Track crossed the threshold from “just a glimmer in Michael Johnson’s eye” to a press-release-ready event series, it made waves both in and out of the track world. 

Sports and sports-business publications ran headlines about GST’s comparatively massive prize offerings. But the track and field world became fixated on the format of the meets themselves, and notably, how field events were not part of the league’s streamlined, made-for-television equation. 

The response was mixed. Blasphemy, screamed the purists. No fair, yelled many of the field eventers themselves. I’ll just make my own thing, nodded Ryan Crouser, sagely. 

As for us? We’ve long advocated for a more purposeful approach to the global track and field calendar here at The Lap Count. If there are fewer high-quality meets on a given weekend, then we’ll see the sports biggest stars face off more often. If there’s a more clearly-defined season, then that bolsters the significance of the postseason. And after this past weekend, we’ll even add the following take to the pile: event-specific meets are great for the regular season.

Grand Slam Track serves as an excellent example of a racing-first, overall track showcase, where multiple event categories are highlighted and the sport’s biggest stars can vie for huge paydays and high-profile wins. The Diamond League offers similarly established athletes competitive and earning opportunities, often in rabbited settings with globally elite fields.

But the fact remains that for North American-based athletes in particular, GST and the Diamond League alone don’t check every box. Distance runners based out of Flagstaff—even those who can secure a coveted starting line spot on the DL circuit—probably aren’t too keen to schlep halfway across the world to shore up their world rankings or nab a World standard. Field event stars want to bolster their season’s resumes as well, and would generally like more fan support than the non-Mondos among them routinely get at full track and field meets. 

Then there’s the fact that each event group prefers different atmospheric conditions. A hot, humid, just-a-touch windy Floridian afternoon makes for lousy 5000m weather, but to a 200m specialist, that’s the gold standard. A perfectly calm, 60º California evening might make for hamstring-tweaking circumstances for a 110m hurdler, but that’s exactly what anyone racing over 800m dreams about. And for the throws? Well, it’s safe to say that what they want—a wind-swept field in rural Oklahoma—is pretty unique in the sport, as well.

We don’t suggest going nuts and hosting dozens of events that pander to high-level performers in each event category. (While the focus of these narrow-focused meets is typically on marks, we still want to force top-tier talent to compete!) But what we do condone is more or less the ecosystem that’s naturally emerged as we enter the Grand Slam era: a handful of really well-executed, event-specific meets sprinkled throughout the regular season, that give athletes their shot to ensure they’re where they need to be ahead of national championships and fans of specific events a chance to spend a day totally immersed in them.

Track Fest, put on by Sound Running at Los Angeles’s Occidental College this past weekend, is just one stellar example of the format, though it’s hardly new. With only four events on the docket—800m, 1500m, 5000m, and 3000m steeplechase—and just a few heats of each, it makes for a relatively compact schedule despite no single individual race being all that short. And the result is a well-attended meet where world-beaters like Jake Wightman (3:35.26 1500m) can get a rep or two in, Olympic medalists like Kenneth Rooks (8:14.25 SC) can knock out the Tokyo ‘25 standard, and unheralded rising stars like Eduardo Herrera (12:58.57 5000m) get to be the hero of the meet. 

Meanwhile, a little ways east in Tucson, Arizona, USATF Throws Fest (we are open to workshopping these names, but hey, at least they’re descriptive) showcased what a field-only meet can look like. Basically, in this configuration, jumps serve as undercard events for the big show: the throws. But more specifically, everything existed to support the headlining event, which was women’s hammer, and how often can you truthfully say that? The cage was electric. 

We had six of the current top-15 hammer throwers in the world in one event: Brooke Anderson (2022 World champion); Janee' Kassanavoid (2023 World silver medalist); Annette Echikunwoke (2024 Olympic silver medalist); Erin Reese (2024 U.S. indoor champ in the weight throw); Rachel Richeson (2025 U.S. indoor champ in the weight throw); and DeAnna Price (2019 World champion). Anderson prevailed, hurling the hammer 79.29m, but you know who really won? Fans of the hammer who made the trip to the University of Arizona’s Roy P. Drachman Stadium and were treated to one of the greatest domestic throws competitions in recent memory.

While these niche meets look to be a hit with athletes and fans, other, more conventional North American, full-meet offerings—like the LA Grand Prix, the Bermuda Games, and now the NYC Grand Prix—are falling by the wayside. The reality is, a full track meet that fields most disciplines, even limiting entry to the best of the best, tends to run long. It can make for clunky television because you’re cutting back and forth between in-action events constantly, and having to educate viewers about the strategies and history of 40-something distinct competitions.

Parts of the GST model (giant paychecks) can’t always be replicated, but others (short programs, series-style competition) can be adapted. Maybe the next version of a Sound Running distance series holds three or four races with the same competitors but does allow rabbits. Maybe an enterprising field event organizer holds a multi-day meet, but entrants simply contest the same event twice.

Jeff Merrill of TRACKLND wrote a phenomenal scene report on Crouser’s World Shot Put Series’s second event, which took place as part of a strength-based exhibition in South Carolina. Crouser has long maintained that the throws can thrive as spectator events when paired with other strongman-type sports, and from the sound of it, he’s spot on. Who’s to say the same wouldn’t hold true for a 100m dash held at a Formula-One race? Both events are all about speed and pushing the limits, and we’re sure fancy watches abound. Why not hold the oft-maligned 10,000m in conjunction with a high-profile cycling crit race?

No matter how far you want to crank the dial in the direction of “discipline-specialized events,” the movement feels inevitable. And if the one problem keeping track and field from reaching the masses turns out to have been “there’s just too much stuff in there” this entire time, then we welcome the push.

More News From The Track And Field World 📰

– Konstanze Klosterhalfen won the Villa de Laredo 10k in a new German national record time of 30:46— her first race since October of last year. Jamal Abdelmaji Eisa Mohammed of the Athlete Refugee Team won the men’s race in 27:47, just ahead of Great Britain’s Emile Cairess, who placed fourth in the Paris Olympic Marathon.

– Albert Korir (2:08:22)—the 2021 NYC Marathon champion—out-dueled Rory Linkletter (2:08:31)—a freshly-minted 2:07 man—for the win at the Ottawa Marathon. Meanwhile, NAZ Elite’s Mercy Chelangat had herself one hell of a debut, going 2:23:33. The two-time NCAA champion at Alabama won the race by almost five minutes. Linkletter and CJ Albertson (third, 2:08:55), were both coming off strong runs in Boston only last month.

– Taking advantage of cooler temps, Grace Loibach Nawowuna of Kenya broke the course record at the Bolder Boulder 10k, going 31:51 at roughly 5,400 feet above sea level. Conner Mantz (28:21) won his third straight Bolder Boulder, but it took sprinting past 2023 10,000m silver medalist Daniel Ebenyo with just steps remaining in the race.

– At the NCAA DII Championships, Alexis Brown of Lenoir-Rhyne University (Hickory, North Carolina) won the 100m in a new DII record, 10.93, which is the second fastest time in the world this year. She also lowered the DII record in the 200m, going 22.35—the 10th fastest time run outdoors in 2025. Grand Valley State University (Allendale, Michigan) won the women’s team title in about the most dramatic, non-4x400m-related fashion imaginable. The men’s team championship went to Pittsburg State (Pittsburg, Kansas), and that one wasn’t particularly close—the squad’s 111 points was almost double what second-place West Texas A&M (Canyon, Texas) scored.

– Sam Blaskowski, a semi-finalist in the 100m and 200m at last year’s U.S. Olympic Trials, put 30 points on the board at the NCAA DIII Champs to help his University of Wisconsin-La Crosse squad secure the team win. Meanwhile, MIT claimed its first ever women’s team title.

– The University of British Columbia swept the team titles at the NAIA Championships in Marion Indiana. Briana Campbell of Jamaica and Life University (Marietta, Georgia) won three events, most notably the 100m hurdles in 13.01—a meet record and the fastest U20 time in the world this year.

– Speaking of NAIA champions… After an Olympic cycle where it wasn’t clear that Team USA would even send three men to Paris for the marathon, things are looking quite a bit brighter heading into 2028. Former NAIA champion and 2:06:39 man Zouhair Talbi will be eligible to represent the U.S. in 2027.

– Off the track, Anna Halland Gabby Thomas ably represented Team USA while wearing a different uniform as part of Sports Illustrated’s 2025 Swimsuit edition.

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