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Compiled by David Melly and Paul Snyder

School’s Out For The Summer ☀️

The 2025 NCAA season is in the books, and what a season it was.

Ten collegiate records went down, including two this past weekend. A college athlete set his second world record this spring (which is two more world records than he has NCAA titles). Five different programs won team titles across the cross country, indoor, and outdoor campaigns—none of whom had won the year prior.

New stars arrived on the scene. Jordan Anthony of Arkansas proved his indoor 60m title was no fluke with a 100m victory, a second-place run in the 200m, and a third-place team effort in the 4x100m. While he didn’t deliver on his pre-final suggestion that he might break the American record, he’ll have more chances this summer: Anthony announced he was turning pro, forgoing his remaining eligibility in both track and field and football, where he was a wide receiver for the Razorbacks.

After losing her NCAA 200m title defense attempt indoors, South Carolina’s JaMeesia Ford couldn’t be denied in her primary event outdoors, clocking the first sub-22 of her career in the prelims and following it up with a 22.21 victory in the final. She came within 0.004 seconds of completing the 100m/200m double, but USC’s Samirah Moody beat her to the line by a hair in the shorter event. Heading into USAs, however, fans—and rivals—will remember Ford’s prelim day first and foremost, where she ran 10.87 (NCAA #6 all-time) and 21.98 (NCAA #5 all-time) about an hour apart. If the 20-year-old can hold that form into August, she’ll be a threat to make her first senior team in one or both events.

Speaking of podium threats, we have to talk about Doris Lemngole. The Alabama superstar was already the NCAA champion and collegiate record holder in the steeplechase, and after she jogged a 9:27 prelim looking, frankly, like she couldn’t run any slower if she tried, her heavy favorite status was cemented heading into the final. But no one—perhaps not even Lemngole or her coaches—was prepared for the show she put on in the final. She knocked an astonishing 12 seconds off her own record to run a world-leading 8:58.15, the first sub-9-minute performance in the world this year and in NCAA history. With World/Olympic champ Winfred Yavi having a slow start to the season, Lemngole couldn’t just medal in Tokyo—she’s got a legit shot at winning.

Running really, really fast was something of a theme across the board in the women’s distance events. Five runners bettered Parker Valby’s one-year-old meet record in the 10,000m, led by now-double-champ Pamela Kosgei, and four got under Suzy Favor’s 35-year-old mark in the 800m. Unfortunately for Michaela Rose, she broke the meet record on the wrong day, running 1:58.95 from the front in the prelims but getting outkicked by Roisin Willis, Makayla Paige, and Meghan Hunter in the final. Willis’s victory has to be one of the most satisfying for longtime fans. The Stanford junior has had an up-and-down collegiate career that included an indoor title as a freshman in 2023 that she hadn’t managed to replicate in the four championships since, but she’s running better than ever now.

The men’s 1500m wasn’t fast—at least at the start—but it sure was fascinating. For the fourth year in a row, a UW Husky came away with the title, and for the second time in three years, that Husky was Nathan Green. One could argue that the field was watered down when NCAA mile champ Abel Teffra and 1500m collegiate record holder Liam Murphy missed the final… but “one” would be dumb as hell, because Green still had to take down Wisconsin’s Adam Spencer, Oregon’s Simeon Birnbaum, Virginia’s Gary Martin, and the hard-charging Ethan Strand of UNC. 

Tactics aficionados and Andy Powell acolytes (hi Mac Fleet) were surely crowing in approval when Green, running at or near the front for much of the early-race jogfest, reached the finish line first despite Strand’s epic kick down the homestretch. Green’s last 400m was 51.46 to Strand’s 51.28, but the Tar Heel had to go from seventh to second in the final 200m and all that extra work cost him the title. The Strandom Fandom would likely point out in response that tactics are easier to learn over time than preternatural talent. If Strand can avoid making the same mistake again next month, he’s already shown that he has the toolbox to contend for a spot on a highly-competitive U.S. team.

On the men’s side, three days and 21 events of competition ended with… a whole lotta waiting. Texas A&M, led by veteran coach Pat Henry, and the USC Trojans helmed by two-time Olympic champion Quincy Watts, tied for the title at 41 points apiece, but both teams had to await the results of a protest (ultimately unsuccessful) in the 4x400m that could’ve shaken up the final scores. The women’s side ended in far less dramatic fashion, as the breadth of scoring potential across both track and field events carried the Georgia Bulldogs to victory—even after a relay scare of their own, as the 4x100m was disqualified for a botched handoff in the prelim.

Here, we have a couple notes for improvement on an otherwise fantastic weekend. If any event needs tiebreakers, it’s the premier team competition on the track and field schedule. The process could be intricate, like a head-to-head dual-meet scoring across events or a tally of individual victories, or it could simply come down to a 100-meter race between each team’s head coach. The latter would make for better television, certainly, but whatever the system, there should be one winner.

The other sticking point is that protests have gotten out of control. Virtually every event final turned red in the live results system as one or more coaches peeled off the requisite $100 bill needed for an appeal from the team wad. Ideally, races should be fairly arbitrated as they’re run, and secondarily, there should be a way to ensure post-facto justice. But NCAA track and field should take a cue from college basketball, which is updating its rules to limit coaches’ ability to call for an official review. Each team should get one “challenge flag” to file appeals, and if they’re successful, they get to keep the flag. But large, well-heeled teams with nothing to lose but a few Benjamins shouldn’t be afforded unlimited protests in the hopes that something shakes out their way upon closer scrutiny.

Where do all the college kids go from here? It’s an interesting question that can have very different answers for very different people. Winning the 100m at NCAAs is not quite the pipeline to professional success you might think, for example. In the last 20 years, only three women and six men have won global senior medals after winning collegiate titles – that’s a 26% success rate. The last ten women’s champions include only two individual World/Olympic medalists, but to be fair, Julien Alfred and Sha’Carri Richardson have had solid pro careers to say the least.

Some have already had success that’s likely to continue. 1500m champ Sophie O’Sullivan, 400m hurdles champ Nathaniel Ezekiel, and steeplechase champ James Corrigan went to the Olympics before they won their first collegiate titles… kinda a topsy-turvy way to build your resume, but the outcome is impressive nevertheless. But those in countries with stiff competition for their national teams—namely, Kenya, Jamaica, and the United States—are not going to be able to simply ride the wave of collegiate glory into Tokyo. 10,000m winners Pamela Kosgei and Ishmael Kipkurui are no locks for the Kenya teams, that’s for sure. Better to be Saskatoonian Savannah Sutherland, who gets to represent Team Canada internationally after winning her second 400H title for Michigan and therefore won’t have to go through Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone, Anna Cockrell, Dalilah Muhammad, and Jasmine Jones just to make her team.

Discus thrower Mykolas Alekna has a clear assignment moving forward: he’s got to figure out how to translate regular-season success into comparable championship results. The 22-year-old world record holder is 0 for 3 in NCAAs, and despite finishing on the podium of the last three global championships, he has no gold medals yet and only finished third at Euros in 2024 after winning in 2022. The curse of being a generational talent is that the bar is very, very high and likely to remain that way for the foreseeable future.

Like all college kids, the NCAA stars are headed into a summer of exciting possibility riding a roller coaster of end-of-year emotions. Some will head to their national championships with a healthy ego or a chip on their shoulder; others will head back to the drawing board in summer training. Many will pick up summer jobs, and for a lucky few that job will be Professional Runner. And it’s entirely possible that we’ll be watching a medal ceremony in Tokyo and look back on one June weekend in Eugene thinking “that’s where it really began.”

A Sweet Escape To Scandinavia 🌍

The Oregon Ducks weren’t the only athletes playing to a home crowd this weekend. At the Bislett Games and Bauhaus-Galan, two Diamond League meets in Oslo and Stockholm, respectively, packed stadiums of athletics fans showed up for evenings of quality track and field—headlined, of course, by the comparatively-small countries’ biggest stars.

In Norway, Jakob Ingebrigtsen’s ongoing injury woes put even more of a spotlight on Viking hurdler Karsten Warholm and his oft-vanishing shirt. The meet ended with a 300-meter showdown between the three best long hurdlers in history, and Warholm didn’t send his fan base home disappointed. After hitting the homestretch more or less even with Olympic champ Rai Benjamin, he hit the turbo-jets after the last hurdle to decisively take home the victory in 32.67, a “world record” in the rarely-contested distance, and only sub-33 second performance in history.

After suffering the slight indignity of losing to Alison dos Santos by 0.07 seconds in front of the home crowd last year, Warholm clearly didn’t want to leave any room for doubt this time around. And he paid the price three days later, when he finished a well-beaten third behind his rivals in Stockholm over 400mH. Rather than provide clarity on the 2025 pecking order, Benjamin’s meet-record 46.54 and dos Santos’s 46.68 primarily demonstrated just how far ahead of the rest of the world these three guys are—now, and at any point in history. The top 20(!) 400m hurdles in history have all been produced by these three guys, as well as 31 of the 33 sub-47 performances ever run.

If you’re a Swedish athletics fan, however, Sunday’s 400mH clash may have felt like a bit of an afterthought. That’s because, a few minutes earlier, Bauhaus-Galan successfully set up and executed a showcase for two of its brightest stars to shine brighter than ever before. On the oval, 30-year-old Swede Andreas Almgren and a group of pacers took a daring crack at Mo Katir’s European record of 12:45.01, and despite doing much of the late racing solo, Almgren came away with a six-second PB and a shiny new 12:44.27 personal best. 

Almgren is the kind of guy that’s had a consistent but largely unremarkable pro career for the better part of a decade, stretching from a World junior bronze over 800m in 2014 to four different fourth-place finishes at European championships over the years, so this was the perfect stage for a long-awaited breakout. And given that the guy who’s record he broke is currently serving a WADA ban for whereabouts violations, he likely had far more than just the Swedish faithful cheering him on for this one.

Despite Almgren’s heroics, however, any conversation that includes both “record setting” and “Swedish track and field” begins and ends, of course, with Mondo Duplantis. It’s understandable to become a bit calloused to Duplantis setting and re-setting his own world record, but watching it live—on TV or in-stadium—is a thrilling experience nevertheless. Duplantis’s first-attempt clearance of 6.28 meters (that’s 20 feet, 7.25 inches for you Imperialists) sent the crowd into a frenzy, and for good reason: while that was Mondo’s twelfth time raising the bar to unprecedented heights, it was his first WR set in Sweden.

Building a whole meet around one or two hometown heroes is a high-stakes proposition: it puts a ton of pressure on one or two stars to define success or failure of the whole endeavor, and it can suck up all the air in the room at the expense of other worthy performances. Had Mondo bowed out at 6.00m or Almgren run 12:46, the meet would’ve still been a highly-entertaining affair, but more than a few fans would’ve filed out of the stands wanting more. So while we’ve become accustomed to stars like Duplantis and Warholm who can perform greatness on command, we can’t take for granted just how remarkable it is to deliver when you’re hauling the weight of an entire nation’s expectations around the track.

International fans tuning in had plenty else to cheer for, however. In a perverse way, it feels fitting for Julien Alfred’s 10.87/10.75 double 100m win across Oslo and Sweden to become a bit of an afterthought. Not because they weren’t each incredible, dominant performances from the Olympic champion. But because Alfred is so reliable—and so low-key a personality—that it felt a bit inevitable that when the St. Lucian finally returned to her signature event for the first time this season, she’d absolutely trounce any field she faced. Alfred’s 10.75 at Bauhaus-Galan will surely evoke comparisons to Melissa Jefferson-Wooden’s 10.73 in Philadelphia, increasing the hype for their eventual showdown, but the way she’s executing right now, MJW feels like the underdog despite her faster season’s best.

Now, some of our more America-centric readers are surely throwing their phones and/or laptops across the room in anger because we’ve gotten this far into our Diamond League analysis without mentioning Nico Young. And their outrage would be justified, because the 22-year-old Mike Smith disciple raced with a discipline and maturity well beyond his age and nascent pro career would suggest, turning what was initially billed as a 5000m world record attempt in Oslo into a coming-out party (no pun intended) for a new American distance star on the world stage. 

Young outdueled Yomif Kejelcha and a whole slew of faster-on-paper, more experienced runners to take the win in 12:45.27, an American outdoor record and the second-fastest mark of all time behind Grant Fisher’s 12:44.09 indoor mark. It’s a crazy indicator of just how good U.S. men’s distance running has gotten that Graham Blanks’s 12:48.20 and Cooper Teare’s 12:57.05 get relegated to “also rans,” although Blanks in particular deserves a huge amount of credit for jumping in the Diamond League deep end in his first pro season and not completely drawing.

Speaking of successful newbies, NCAA indoor champion-turned-On-pro Bella Whittaker has spent the better part of the spring proving that Virginia Beach was no fluke, picking up two Diamond League 400m wins in 49.58 and 49.78. These were no watered-down fields, either: Whittaker successfully beat Norwegian record holder Henriette Jaeger, World Indoor champ Amber Anning, Dutch relay stalwart Lieke Klaver, and two-time World medalist Sada Williams twice in four days. And while she’s the exact opposite of a newbie, we can’t forget to mention Dalilah Muhammad, who’s having a swan song for the ages in her final pro season. 

Muhammad set the age-35 world record in the 400m hurdles and took Femke Bol hurdle-for-hurdle through 300+ meters in Stockholm, running 52.91 to break 53 seconds for the first time in nearly four years. Clearly racing with nothing to lose is working out for Muhammad and it would be great to see her ride off into the sunset with one last U.S. team—or even a medal.

Next up on the Diamond League circuit, a stop in Paris. Entries are being slowly released, and while there likely won’t be the same level of home-country heroics as the last two meets, steeplechaser Alice Finot and 1500m runner Agathe Guillemot will probably get an extra boost from their fan bases. Jimmy Gressier will try to represent the home colors with a win in the 5000m… but he’ll have to go through Nico Young to do it. And Gabriel Tual has the fastest PB in a stacked 800m field, but Tshepiso Masalela and Bryce Hoppel won’t just hand him the victory for the sake of a feel-good story. And speaking of the 800m…

The Men’s 800m May Become The Best Event Of 2025 🤠

Roughly two years ago in this very newsletter we (okay, it was Kyle) asked in so many words “what’s wrong with the men’s 800m right now?”

The first half of this decade was a strange time for the event. By the late 2010s, David Rudisha—the still-world-record-holder and perhaps the most dominant athlete to ever race the two-lap tango—had been forced out of competition via repeated injury and multiple vehicle accidents. And in his absence, nobody had emerged as his heir apparent.

Kenya’s Emmanuel Korir won 800m gold at the 2020 Olympics, followed by his compatriot Ferguson Rotich and Poland’s Patryck Dobek. All three men enjoyed decently-successful careers, but none came close to capturing total dominance over the event. Perhaps unfairly, given that none of them came within spitting distance of running as fast as Rudisha’s 1:40.91, they also failed to capture the sport’s attention outside of that Olympic cycle. There were dozens of other guys right there with them on the World Athletic toplist, and somebody had to win the medals at that weird, Covid-delayed Games.

This sport is a brutal one when it comes to legacies. You can win Olympic gold and never factor in the “who’s the GOAT?” discussions for more than a passing mention. Plenty have won a global title or two, and wound up just another guy in the sport’s collective memory.

As Kyle observed in 2023, we simply had a lot of guys running the 800m. For a time, there was actually too much parity in the event, and no way for fans to develop storylines in their minds beyond “well, let’s just toss 15 names into a hat and pick one we think could win.”

That began to change shortly after we fired off the newsletter in question. (Editor’s note: based on our NCAA long-shots piece last week, it’s entirely possible that the Lap Count Effect causes the opposite of what we write about to happen.) From a deep pool of guys, a smaller, eight-lane final’s worth of medal contender-types and second-tiers with true spoiler potential have coalesced and reversed the fortunes of the men’s 800m entirely.

The 2024 podium from Paris might still make up the core of this small but elite group: Emmanuel Wanyonyi of Kenya, Canada’s Marco Arop, and to a slightly lesser extent, Algeria’s Djamel Sedjati. 

Wanyonyi just split sub-50 just on the heels of the rabbit in Stockholm then hung on to comfortably win in a world-leading time of 1:41.95. In his one showdown against Arop over two laps this year, the tall Canadian took him down, but because Arop has stuck to the Grand Slam circuit, rather than the Diamond League races, we don’t have much of a sample size. 

Arop’s season best is about a second and a half slower than Wanyonyi’s, but you could easily make the case that right now it’s actually Arop who’s the man to beat. Arop is 3 for 3 in 800m victories this season, but Wanyonyi is only 2 for 4, and in Rabat lost to two other runners not named Marco.

The fact that there’s a murky debate over the top 800m man in the world is actually fun, rather than sort of confusing and vaguely off putting. The speculation sure isn’t hurt by the fact that the next time we see these two square off may very well be in the finals at Worlds.

But while Wanyonyi and Arop would be your headliners—top billing in big scratchy-looking text like on a Coachella poster—in just slightly smaller font beneath them is another tier of medal hopefuls. Dudes like Sedjati, who hasn’t posted a win this outdoor season but has done enough to demonstrate he’s still got one of the most lethal last-150-meter closes in the business.

Along with him, we have Rabat and Doha DL champ Tshepiso Masalela of Botswana alongside Americans Bryce Hoppel (who’s had a rocky start to his outdoor campaign but tends to peak well and is the seventh-fastest man ever in the event) and Josh Hoey (number three in the world this year by time, and on a historic heater right now). These are the guys who, if everyone’s trajectory holds, could find themselves with medals draped around their necks in Tokyo, too.

Then we have a final bunching of athletes, who feel like longer shots to seize control of the event, but very well could if things shake out just right. We’re talking about France’s Gabriel Tual, Spaniard Mohamed Attoui, Great Britain’s Max Burgin, the resurgent 2019 World champ Donavan Brazier (hot off a negative-split 1:43.81 performance at Portland Track Festival, in his second race in years), plus Algeria’s hard-closing wildcard Slimane Moula. 

That’s 10 dudes vying for one of eight lanes at the World Championship final. Drama already! Then when you close your eyes and envision this race taking place, you can see it playing out any number of ways, each of them equal parts exciting and chaotic. Some of the guys we’ve slotted as longer shot have actually beaten guys this year we’ve ranked as likely medalists. And others, like Brazier, have sky-high ceilings but face challenges around simply getting to September in one piece.

It’s easy to imagine Arop and Wanyonyi—each viewing the other as their prime threat—battling for control of the race, winding up in the “Gray Zone,” and effectively serving as rabbits for the rest of the field. Does one of them hold on, going wire-to-wire and giving Rudisha’s record a scare? In this scenario, who goes out with them? Does Brazier fully have his sea legs back by then? Hoey, Masalela, and Tual are rarely shy about sticking their noses into a hot pace. Are the kickers rewarded for their patience and tactical prowess, with the win going to the late-closer who best navigates the carnage over the final 100m?

Realistically, any of these outcomes feels feasible right now. We’ve got some data points on the state of the event right now, but the big picture still feels tantalizingly hazy. Each high quality men’s 800m between now and Tokyo is a must-watch event (or at least a must-re-watch event on YouTube the next day). We’ve come a long way since 2023!

More News From The Track And Field World 📰

– In non-Brazier results out of the Portland Track Festival: Jess Hull took the 800m in 1:58.69 and Raevyn Rogers shaved about five seconds off her season’s best in the second 800m heat, going 2:00.45. | Sinclaire Johnson thrilled the home crowd with a 4:01.46 1500m win… a few ticks ahead of BYU’s Riley Chamberlain, who failed to advance to the NCAA final but bounced back to run an all-time collegiate top-10 4:03.98. | Isaac Updike lowered his PB in the steeple to 8:13.64 to secure the World standard ahead of Tokyo. | Owen Powell (3:36.49) and Josiah Tostenson (3:36.85) posted the second and third fastest 1500m times ever for American high schoolers. | Katelyn Tuohy won the 5000m in 15:04.07 in her first race of the outdoor season. | And local folk hero Craig Engels paced two heats of the 800m and two heats of the 1500m.

– Just weeks out from its season-capping Los Angeles meet, Grand Slam Track has announced the conclusion of its inaugural campaign after three events. The league intends to return in 2026, per a statement issued by league founder Michael Johnson. The CITIUS MAG crew has offered our own thoughts in a range of different fora, including Aisha Praught-Leer and Eric Jenkins on the latest Off the Rails pod, Anderson Emerole in a YouTube explainer video, and Chris Chavez on the CITIUS MAG podcast.

– The 58-year-old Paavo Nurmi Games were held yesterday in Turku, Finland, featuring three men over 70 meters in the discus led by Kristjan Ceh at 70.61m, Frederik Ruppert proving his Rabat Diamond League performance was no fluke with an 8:10.39 win in the steeplechase, and Gabriela DeBues-Stafford continuing her comeback campaign with a 4:02.00 1500m win over a strong field. In less positive news, Marcell Jacobs’s sprint struggles continue as he ran 10.30 in the 100m heats then finished dead last in the final in 10.44.

– At the 2025 Adrian Martinez Classic, 10,000m Olympian Woody Kincaid honed his speed with a 3:37.47 1500m victory over Eric Holt and Nia Akins beat an 800m field that included Olivia Baker, Ajee’ Wilson, and others in 2:00.77, all on a high school track next to a playground in Concord, MA.

– Taylor Roe and Alex Maier continue to rack up U.S. road titles, this time in Peoria, Illinois for the USATF 4 Mile Championship—held in conjunction with the Steamboat Classic. Roe broke the tape in 19:41, over 20 seconds clear of second-placer Amanda Vestri, while Maier sweated out a three-second margin of victory over Casey Clinger.

– Last summer, Kenya’s Bernard Kibet Koech placed fifth in the 10,000m at the Paris Olympics. Now, he’s been provisionally suspended by the Athletics Integrity Unit for the use of a banned substance in an Athlete Biological Passport case.

– After a lengthy trial, Gjert Ingebrigtsen has been convicted of assaulting his daughter, Ingrid, and acquitted of the other charges. He was handed a delayed 15-day prison sentence and will pay a small compensatory fine.

– In tragic news, Eliud Kipsang, the former NCAA 1500m record holder, suffered cardiac arrest and passed away on June 10th. The Alabama star was 28 years old.

– Nina Kuscsik, the first woman to enter the New York City Marathon and the first officially recognized female winner of the Boston Marathon, has died at 86.

– Embattled NFL wide receiver Tyreek Hill ran 10.15 for 100m this weekend in California, but he won’t be racing Olympic champ Noah Lyles after all as Lyles told the New York Post that the race was canceled for nebulous “personal reasons.”

– The B.A.A. has shared revisions to its qualification policies around net downhill marathon courses. A time penalty will be added to results run on a course with a net loss of 1,500 feet or more. And if you’re able to secure a pair of Heelys and find a marathon with 6,000 or more feet of net elevation loss, we’re sorry to report that it won’t be BQ eligible, but good for you for trying.

– Congratulations to Betsy Saina, who is pregnant with her second child! Saina has deferred her spot on the U.S. World Championship marathon squad, meaning additional congratulations are in order to Jess McClain, who will now rep Team USA for the first time internationally.

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