Times (And What They Mean) Are A-Changing ⏱️

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Compiled by David Melly, Paul Snyder and Paul Hof-Mahoney

In A World Of Fast Times, Who’s In The Race Still Matters 🥇

For what seems like the gazillionth weekend in a row, the Diamond League delivered historic speed and historic depth, this time in Stade Sébastien Charléty in Paris’s 13th arrondissement.

Don’t take that as a complaint: watching previously-rare barriers get broken over and over is one of the most fun things about being a track and field fan in 2025. While no world records went down in Paris this time after two fell last year, the cumulative effect of stacked fields and favorable racing conditions was impressive nevertheless. 10 men broke 13 minutes in the 5000m; 11 women broke four minutes in the 1500m. Five women got under 50 seconds in the 400m (including two under 49—Marileidy Paulino and Salwa Eid Naser in yet another epic matchup) and six broke 3:30 for 1500m, four of whom had never done so before.

Let’s start with the men’s 1500m.

Unlike Lamecha Girma’s return to racing post-Olympics concussion, which happened an hour outside the TV window, the men’s metric mile was ironically not a Diamond League event even though it featured prominently mid-program. With six French entrants, led by Azeddine Habz, this race felt specifically crafted to give the home crowd something to cheer about, which the fans sorely needed. (Thomas Gogois’s third-place finish in the men’s triple jump was the high point prior to the 1500m.)

Habz came into this race more than ready to entertain. Two weeks earlier, he challenged Timothy Cheruiyot all the way to the line in Rome, ultimately prevailing. And in front of a stadium packed with his countrymen, he promptly followed the rabbits to his second high-profile win of the month.

The surprise came not necessarily from Habz’s win but from just how fast he—and everyone else in the field—ran. Azeddine Habz, who has never made an Olympic final and finished 11th in the only World final he’s made, stopped the clock in 3:27.49, making him the sixth-fastest athlete in the event’s history.

With all due respect… WHAT?! 

Habz is clearly having a career season, but it’s mind-blowing to think that he’s now ahead of names like Cole Hocker, Noah Ngeny, Mo Farah, and yes, Tim Cheruiyot on the all time list. And it wasn’t like he was the only guy in the field having the race of his life: on his heels, 19-year-old Kenyan Phanuel Koech, who has only two 1500m results total listed on his World Athletics profile, improved from 3:32.26 to 3:27.72 to break Ronald Kwemoi’s world junior record, set in 2014. In third, George Mills skipped the 3:29s entirely, running 3:28.36 off a 3:30.95 prior PB to land at #2 on the British all-time list. When all was said and done, 13 of the 14 finishers broke 3:32 and 13 of the 14 set a lifetime best (more statistical deep-diving can be found here thanks to CITIUS summer intern Keenan Baker).

Did Paris just stumble into one of the greatest 1500s in world history in an attempt to deliver a French win in a non-DL event? In a word, no.

Don’t let the dazzling array of PBs and NRs fool you, people. Whether it’s the result of a fast track, science-fiction spikes, a stomach-churning dosage of sodium bicarbonate, or the inexorable forward march of time, performances are simply getting faster across the board these days, particularly in the distance races. While it can be exciting to watch history get made and record books to get torn up, context still matters: in this case: who else was in the race?

The 1500m in Paris featured zero finalists from last year’s Olympics and only two—Habz and Abel Kipsang—from Worlds the year prior. The field featured no outdoor medalists, the sole global accolade being Kipsang’s World Indoor bronze from 2022. That’s not to disrespect or discredit the performances of the guys who showed up and set their lifetime bests; it’s simply to reiterate that, in 2025, times only mean so much.

For all the hiccups and imperfections of Grand Slam Track’s distance offerings, it’s quite simply more thrilling to watch the entire Olympic podium race head-to-head four three times in a row, particularly when you throw in 2-3 global champions over 800 meters. Sure, Josh Kerr’s season’s best is 3:34.44, but does anyone in their right mind think that he wouldn’t be at least contending for the win, if not handily dispatching the entire field, were he in last Friday’s race?

The perfect example of why competition matters over results comes from the very same meet. Anavia Battle is the tenth fastest 200m runner of 2025 by season’s best, but in Paris she picked up her fourth Diamond League victory this season and remains unbeaten over seven individual races this year. Fool me once, shame on you; fool me four times… I’m sleeping on a contender. Battle may have a 22.27 SB, but everything else about her resume suggests that she’ll be in the mix for a national team or even a global medal.

Another intriguing counterfactual to the “it’s all about time” narrative came in the men’s 800m, where Paris featured an intriguing shuffle to the pecking order in an event we can’t stop talking about. For the third time on the circuit this season, the race was won in 1:42.7x, but this time, it wasn’t Olympic champ Emmanuel Wanyonyi or a red-hot Tshepiso Masalela, who have two DL wins apiece; it was Spaniard Mohamed Attaoui who picked up his first career Diamond League victory with an pass on Americans Bryce Hoppel and Josh Hoey.

The time may have been largely in line with what we’ve come to expect, but the result certainly wasn't. Attaoui finished fifth in last year’s stacked Olympic final, but he’s already raced a lot this year and only picked up two wins in the 800m. Generally speaking, you don’t expect the guy who finished dead-last in the final at the Spanish indoor championships to beat the World Indoor champion four months later. His surprise win here was at least partially the result of a tactical blunder on Hoey’s part, as the front-running American let just enough space open up on the rail to give Attaoui a path to victory. But Hoey still ran 1:43.00, the second-fastest time of his career, and Hoppel bounced back well after an off day in Stockholm.

In many ways, Attaoui’s win was more impressive than Habz’s, even if the time was comparatively more modest. He beat two of the ten fastest men in history in Hoppel and Gabriel Tual, along with Masalela, who seemed to pack it in after getting knocked around in the pack for the last 200m. And because the race was still fairly honest, with the rabbit taking the field through 400m in 49.15, the result can’t be written off as a “well anything can happen in a kicker’s race” kind of fluke.

At its best, that’s what a successful Diamond League delivers: eye-popping times and tongue-wagging storylines. 20-year-old Faith Cherotich not only reclaimed the world lead in the steeplechase with a 8:53.37 victory, she defeated her second Olympic champion in as many weeks as she held off Peruth Chemutai for the win. She’s now the fastest woman of 2025 and the winningest, so she’s got a big target on her back. Poor Trey Cunningham ran 13.00 in the hurdles for the THIRD time in his career, and while it probably stings a little to get stuck at the 13-second barrier once again, handily defeating Olympic champ Grant Holloway in his return to racing after an early-spring setback is a rich consolation prize.

Perhaps no one embodied the double-edged sword of “trackflation” better than Grace Stark, who ran 12.21 to win the 100m hurdles and jump to T-fifth on the all-time list—but only third among Americans this year. That being said, she beat world record holder Tobi Amusan in the same race and is now three for four in Diamond League wins, so Olympic champ and world leader Masai Russell shouldn’t get too comfortable atop her throne.

Statistics and record-keeping play an important role in track and field storytelling. Winning a race is easy to see on screen (or at least in FAT finish-line screenshots), but how does one tenth-place finish measure up to another? To truly understand and follow along with the sport over time, fans need to be able to recognize when a race is historically fast. But trying to fully process results without factoring in both performance and competition is like watching a movie with only video or audio, and there’s a reason why silent films and radio dramas don’t dominate the market these days.

The National Transfer Portal Is OPEN 🇯🇲▶️🇹🇷

Last Wednesday night, there were some very intriguing murmurs spreading throughout track Twitter. To understand those murmurs, however, we need to look a few days earlier at more murmurs that the Turkish Ministry of Sports was allegedly offering highly-lucrative financial incentives to Jamaican athletes that would be willing to transfer their allegiance ahead of the 2028 Olympics.

With details left incredibly vague, it seemed as though there were a few major announcements on the horizon, and Detective Paulie Throws was able to bust out a comically small magnifying glass to put together an absolute stunner: all signs were pointing towards Rojé Stona, the Jamaican Olympic discus champion… becoming Turkish?

On Thursday morning, a string of news reports, first announced by Kayon Raynor, decimated  Jamaica’s talent pool in the field events. First, it was Stona and shot put bronze medalist Rajindra Campbell, the only two Jamaican throwers to ever win Olympic medals. Then, it was Jaydon Hibbert, the triple jump prodigy who owns the nine best marks ever by a junior athlete, who finished fourth in Paris at only 19. The final blow (for now) came in the form of Wayne Pinnock, long jump silver medalist in Budapest, Paris, and Nanjing. In the blink of an eye, Jamaica lost half of their medals from last year. A few days later, Nigerian sprint star Favour Ofili joined the Jamaican quartet in their move to Anatolia.

So what are we supposed to make of this? Allegiance transfers have been a thing for a long time, whether it’s Americans following grandparental lineage to boost their chances of making a team or Cubans sweeping the Olympic triple jump podium while wearing Spanish, Portuguese, and Italian kits. But this very clearly feels different. Not only do the athletes (seemingly) have no prior connection to their destination federation and are making no claims resembling political asylum, but the very public discussion of financial incentives gives these moves a “free agency with no salary cap” vibe that feels somewhat icky. If it’s this easy to pry top-tier talent away from its home nation, then the floodgates are open for richer federations (if there is such a thing as a rich governing body of track and field) to simply buy athletes from smaller nations. 

When you look a little deeper than the eye-popping $500,000 signing bonus (which apparently athletes won’t actually get until they actually don the red and white), these decisions symbolize something so much bigger than a pretty paycheck. Both the Jamaican (JAAA) and Nigerian (AFN) federations have developed a track record of, in kind terms, disorganization. In not-so-kind terms, they’ve burned a lot of bridges with more than a few of their star athletes the last few years. 

AFN’s errors have been more glaringly obvious. 10 athletes, including Ofili, were disqualified days before competing at the Tokyo Olympics for improper testing procedures, and Ofili also found out three days before the 100m prelims in Paris that AFN had simply failed to enter her, despite her having qualified. The writing was on the wall for Ofili’s relationship with AFN, and she shared as much in an Instagram post last July. Her case to the AIU surrounding her transfer is that it isn’t based on financial incentives, and you really can’t blame her. Annette Echikunwoke, a hammer thrower who also was on the receiving end of AFN’s incompetence in Tokyo, transferred back to the U.S. following that debacle and then won Olympic silver in Paris. It’s crazy what happens when these athletes are actually allowed to compete!

The case for the Jamaican athletes is slightly more nuanced. JAAA’s issues stem more from a sense of disrespect or neglect as opposed to incompetence (except for the unfortunate case of hammer thrower Nayoka Clunis, who, like Ofili, wasn’t entered in last year’s Olympics despite qualifying). 

Danniel Thomas-Dodd laid these issues out plain and simple in an impassioned interview after the qualifying round of the women’s shot put in Paris, where she was impacted by not being given access to her coach for the two-and-a-half weeks she was in the Olympic village:

“These people [JOA and JAAA] don’t care about field events in Jamaica. If they did, they would make sure that we have everything we need… The gold medal that they were waiting for did not come from the track, it came from the field events, and those are the events that they neglect so much in Jamaica. Most of the medals we’ve gotten so far at these Games comes from the field events, and we’re the most marginalized groups within Jamaican track and field.”  

If a statement like that on the sport’s biggest stage didn’t sink in for the officials at JAAA, maybe the one made by Stona, Campbell, Hibbert and Pinnock last week will. 

The transfer comes with a three-year waiting period from an athlete’s last competition for their prior nation. For Stona and Hibbert, this means they’ll miss this year’s World Championships and the Commonwealth Games next year, but should be eligible to represent Turkey at the 2027 World Championships. For Campbell and Pinnock, who competed at World Indoors in March, they will also miss Worlds in 2027, and Pinnock won’t be able to compete in the first World Ultimate Championships next September. The money is nice, probably life-changing in most cases, but it also says a lot about the way JAAA fails to support their field eventers that bonafide global stars are willing to sacrifice several major championships to go to a federation where they’ll feel noticed at all.

The public response towards the athletes has, generally speaking, been positive. Fans seem to understand the desire of the athletes to seek support and appreciation they desperately deserve, and that’s the way it should be. The underlying issues that caused these moves have been known for years, but now they’re in plain view for the entire track and field world to see.

Surely, most if not all athletes’ preference would be to compete for their country of origin while feeling supported and financially stable. Favour Ofili, Jaydon Hibbert, and co. are charting a path that, for them, seeks to correct an imbalance between the incentives and constraints inherent in the challenges of being a professional athlete.

The ball shot put is now squarely in the court sector of JAAA, AFN, and any other national federation with shallow pockets and a tenuous relationship with their athletes. How do you respond to this? 

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What Breaking4 Can Teach Us About Performance And Storytelling 📖

Late last week, Part 1 of Amazon’s Breaking4: Faith Kipyegon vs. The 4-Minute Mile series premiered. Part 2 will be the sub-four attempt itself on Thursday. Part 3, scheduled to air a month later, will presumably be a once-the-dust-settles, legacy-looking reaction to whatever transpired. This is a cool way to drum up interest, share the event, and process its impact, all in one place.

In a tight 50-minute package, the mini-doc attempts to tell the Faith Kipyegon story up to now, introduce the motivation behind her Nike-backed attempt to become the first woman to run a sub-four-minute mile, and set the stage for the big day in Paris. Breaking4 comes from Box to Box, the same production company behind all those wildly popular Netflix deep dives into generally more niche sports (including a previous foray into the world of track and field, SPRINT), so viewers will probably feel something familiar about the structure and flow.

The biographical depiction of Kipyegon leans heavily into her humble upbringing as the daughter of farmers who ran four kilometers barefoot to and from school each day as a 5-year-old. We even see clips of her racing barefoot en route to a fourth-place finish at the 2010 World Junior Cross Country Championships—her first international competition. From there we witness snippets of her meteoric rise through the senior ranks, punctuated by her 2016 Olympic gold medal in the 1500m.

It’s here that the filmmakers share what they posit is Kipyegon’s underlying motivation. It’s not world records or medals or to dominate the competition. It’s running as an act of service to her community. To give back in a very tangible way—her small village was connected to Kenya’s electrical grid after the Rio Games when news spread that her parents had to leave their hometown to watch their daughter’s heroics on television. It’s running to inspire.

This is presented as the foundation of Faith Kipyegon, the GOAT middle distance runner. A hardscrabble childhood where food at dinnertime wasn’t a given, a prodigious talent that shone through the adversity, a ceaseless sense of belief in herself, and the joy that has always accompanied the journey. In the aggregate, this is what led to her 4:07.64 mile performance in 2023. 

It’s why she feels she has little left to prove on the track in terms of conventional accolades like placements and medals. We see footage of Roger Bannister looking like he’s going to die after becoming the world’s first sub-four miler, overlaid with footage of Kipyegon looking a whole lot smoother, running a similar pace.

If you’re clicking into this mini-doc by accident or out of a mild curiosity about the well-publicized Nike marketing campaign around the attempt, by now you’re invested in its history-making potential and in Kipyegon as an often-smiling, camera shy assassin who may just pull it off.

But for more diehard fans of running, there hasn’t anything earth shattering here for you yet. There are beautiful drone shots of Kipyegon and her teammates logging miles in the morning darkness and working out and relaxing at their training center. That’s all cool, but it’s not what you likely came for: answers to how in the hell Kipyegon will shave seven or eight seconds off her mile time.

The filmmakers, having anticipated this, promptly smash-cut to a series of very cool looking spaces at Nike’s Beaverton, Oregon, campus. We are shown Kipyegon’s spikes for the attempt, and are informed that precious grams have been shaved off their weight from a previous iteration, force-rebounding airbags have been plumped up. We see Kipyegon on a treadmill, hooked up to tubes and wires, her athletic vitals being precisely measured. There are heated discussions around the materials of her racing attire, how there’s a need to allow greater expansion of her chest cavity. Her speed suit is covered in nodes, which apparently improve its aerodynamics.

It’s a stark contrast to Kipyegon’s more “holistic” (as her performance director Valentijn Trouw describes it) training setup back home in Kenya. And if there’s a central tension presented, it’s where engineering and science end and human fallibility begins. We see Kipyegon drop out of her 2025-opening cross country race. We see her fall just short of the 1000m world record, which is roughly the pace she’ll need to cover for an additional 609m. 

Everyone involved in the Breaking4 project appears very clearheaded about the fact that it's an audacious goal and that everything needs to be 100% perfect on Thursday for the clock to stop in the 3:59 range. If 97% of it comes down to Faith Kipyegon, maybe 1% of the equation is the footwear and apparel side of things.

We’re led to understand it’s the final 2% that’s proving tricky: the pacemaking and drafting configuration, plus brand-new spikes, will ultimately make the race non-World Athletics compliant. Even with the aid of Wavelight, Kipygon’s team of male pacers have a difficult task: running in a precise and unnatural formation to create the optimum wind pockets around Kipyegon, both breaking the wind for her and reducing drag behind her. One pacer will have to basically run a fartlek, hitting the curves hard to maintain his distance from Kipyegon, then slowing on the straights, all while not sucking her into an unevenly paced effort herself.

Like all the fanfare ahead of Eliud Kipchoge’s Breaking2, we’re essentially talking about one long Nike commercial, but it’s also very inspiring and a really interesting experiment. This doc should help with fan buy-in to the project. After tuning in, longtime fans of Kipyegon and newcomers to her corner alike will be cheering her on with equal gusto. Smartly, the focus of this media narrative is Kipyegon herself, not the whizz-bang scientific innovation that keeps the hamsters on the wheels in Beaverton. The lasting impact of this effort, success or failure, hinges on the public knowing—and liking—Faith the athlete. Regardless of whether she runs sub-four, in their minds, Kipyegon’s name will be synonymous with challenging the boundaries of human possibility. 

We should be looking at the narrative approach here, because it’s powerful and replicable. In one media platform, we have a stakes-setting and well-made documentary that tells you everything you need to know to care. In the same place we’ll soon have the live event itself. And again, if you don’t practice great tab management, you’ll get a high-quality post-event recap there on July 25th, as well, working hard to cement the project’s lasting legacy and address whatever narrative spin has naturally occurred in the preceding month. 

It’s not reinventing the wheel by any stretch of the imagination. And it’s unlikely Amazon will become track and field’s savior, even if in this one instance it’s pulling ESPN-duty and both hyping up and broadcasting an event. But anytime something somewhat novel, particularly when it’s this potentially historic, in the sport, it’s worth paying attention.

More News From The Track And Field World 📰

– Meet and national records were flying every which way at New Balance Outdoor Nationals, so it’s editorially rough to nail down just a few highlights, but alas, here we go: Natalie Dumas managed to steal the show, winning three individual events, all in meet record fashion, and all fast enough to place her in the U.S. top-10 all-time high school rankings—the 400m hurdles (55.99), the 400m (51.14), and the 800m (2:00.11). | Quincy Wilson won the 400m (45.37) and helped his Bullis 4x400m secure the victory and meet record in 3:08.28. | The Bullis girls had a dominant weekend of their own, winning the 4x400m (3:37.24) as well as the 4x100m, the latter in meet record time (44.80). | Union Catholic (NJ) knocked eight seconds off the national record in the DMR, going 11:12.20, thanks in part to a 4:35 anchor split from Paige Sheppard, who also won the mile (4:33.67). | The 4x800m squad from Herriman (UT) broke the longstanding national record, going 7:26.12.

– At Ostrava Golden Spike, the men’s 1500m fast times continued to flow, with four dudes dipping under 3:30, led by Phanuel Koech (3:29.05); Josh Hoey took third in 3:29.75. | South Africa’s Prudence Sekgodiso won the 800m in 1:57.16, then the next five women also broke two. | Femke Bol took third in the flat 400m (49.98), behind Salwa Eid Naser (49.15) and Lynna Irby-Jackson (49.82).

– Cooper Lutkenhaus lowered his own high school national 800m record at Nike Outdoor Nationals, going 1:45.45, and Jane Hedengren added to her already-impressive resume with an 8:40.03 HS national record in the 3000m.

– The women’s 800m at USAs just got even more interesting, with yet another global medalist appearing to be back in business after a down period. Ajeé Wilson dipped under the two-minute barrier for the first time in two years at the Elliott Denman Invitational in New Jersey, winning in 1:58.76.

– On was a steamy, storm-delayed day along the shore of Lake Superior, Minnesota Distance Elite’s Joel Reichow won Grandma’s Marathon in 2:11:58; Lilian Jekporir Chebi won bested the women’s field by two minutes, crossing the line in 2:25:14. Minnesotan Olympian Dakotah Popehn finished second in the Garry Bjorklund Half Marathon on the same course in 1:09:13 behind teammate Annie Frisbee, who won in 1:09:05.

– 2025 Boston Marathon champ Sharon Lokedi notched another win in Beantown, crossing the line at the B.A.A. 10K in 31:39. The race doubled as the U.S. 10K championships, which overall third-place finisher Emily Sisson claimed in 31:42. Gabriel Gerald Geay won the men’s race outright in 28:14, while Joe Klecker (sixth place overall in 28:35) took top American honors. Zouhair Talbi, who placed second overall (28:18), is in the process of transferring his allegiance from Morocco to the United States.

– Following her departure from New Balance, World Indoor medalist Emily Mackay announced she’s joined Union Athletics Club and will train out of Boulder, Colorado, going forward. 

– Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone will be running 400m at Pre. Any time SML skips the hurdles at this point, particularly this late into the season, you have to assume she’ll be at least eyeing the American record, Sanya Richards-Ross’s 48.70.

– Prior to this weekend’s national trials, Jamaican sprinting great Shelly-Ann Fraser-Pryce announced that the 2025 season would be her last as a professional athlete.

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