Silesia, Bahama, Come On Pretty Mama ⏱️

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For Travis Hunter, fishing isn’t just a hobby—it’s his happy place. 🌅🎣

Before the stadium lights and game day cheers, it was long days on the water with his cousins in West Palm Beach, Florida. No plays to run, just rods and reels from sun up to sundown. 

These days, football comes first… but that fisherman heart still beats strong. And after a long day on the field or out on the water, a cold Crisp Apple? It’s the best feeling. Like candy, but better for you. 🍎

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Compiled by David Melly and Paul Snyder

The Polish Elephant In The Room 🇵🇱🐘

Generally speaking, Diamond League meets are an entertaining presentation of track and field. The stadiums are packed, the athletes are high-profile, the schedule is well-paced. But for some unknown reason, many if not most of the Diamond League meets also feature weird, large mascots prominently positioned near the finish line.

Inevitably at these meets, one of the world’s greatest athletes sprints across the finish line in a signature, perhaps even record-setting, performance, and before they’ve even caught their breath they’re accosted by a larger-than-life fur creature dancing, posing, or hugging them. If you just ran your guts out to clock a new 400-meter PB and are gasping for air while your legs burn with lactic acid, it’s understandable to think that you might be hallucinating.

But no, this has become a regular feature of the DL circuit, and unlike, say, every other sport, where mascots are largely relegated to entertaining the crowd during a timeout or between innings, track and field has apparently decided that it’s better to place these giant acid-trip nightmares uncomfortably close to both the athletes and the TV cameras.

Saturday’s Kamila Skolimowska Memorial, a.k.a. the Silesia Diamond League, featured a large blue elephant in virtually every finish line shot. And while it was annoying and intrusive from a viewing perspective, the “elephant in the room” became an apt metaphor for a lot of the action. Because in Silesia, the results themselves only told part of the story: so much of what went down in Chorzow, Poland, was made more dramatic by what we weren’t seeing or saying.

Take the women’s 100m, for instance. On the track, Melissa Jefferson-Wooden continued doing what she’s done all season: winning and running fast. This time, it was a 10.66 victory over Tia Clayton (10.82) and Marie-Josee Ta Lou-Smith (10.87), with Jefferson-Wooden’s training partner Sha’Carri Richardson running a season’s best 11.05 but finishing well out of contention in sixth. But who wasn’t there? Olympic champ Julien Alfred, who withdrew from both Silesia and today’s meet in Lausanne earlier in the week with an injury. Alfred’s been running just as well as Jefferson-Wooden all season, but in a sport with such a high injury risk, showing up can be half the battle. Alfred making it all the way from her first race on February 2nd to Worlds in September is no guarantee, and the combination of health and fitness MJW is showing off right now has to boost her into favorite status for Tokyo.

Everyone who was supposed to lined up for the men’s 100m, but plenty was still left unsaid. After their dramatic showdown at USAs, all eyes were on Noah Lyles and Kenny Bednarek when they matched back up in Silesia. And after their gold-silver finish in Paris last summer, all eyes were also on Lyles and Kishane Thompson for their first matchup since the Olympic final. And both were happening at the same time!

In the race itself, Thompson got out first and best and held off the stacked field to equal the meet record of 9.87. Since getting beaten by Akani Simbine (who finished seventh here) in his very first race of the season, Thompson has not lost over 100m since. Does that make him the favorite for gold in Tokyo? Hard to say. Mainly because Noah Lyles, the defending World champ, is treating his whole season like one of his races: starting out slow, then accelerating faster than everyone else to catch the field and come out on top. Lyles improved his season’s best to 9.90, beating U.S. 100m champ Bednarek, who finished third by a hair in 9.96—9.952, to be precise, to Christan Coleman’s 9.958, who in turn beat Trayvon Bromell in 9.97.

So Lyles was behind Thompson, but all of a sudden he’s ahead of three of the best American sprinters this season after only a few races. Will that 0.03 second gap hold over the next month? Will someone else squeeze his way back in between? For those wondering, Bednarek and Lyles were cordial in both the pre-race press conference and post-race handshakes, with Bednarek saying that the two had addressed their off-track issues. But after the race, Lyles posted and then deleted a seeming reference to the “track spice” shenanigans that started the whole mess, so who knows how long their armistice holds…

In the women’s 3000m, the collective beef the entire track and field community has with the event’s extremely sketchy world record nearly came to an end as Faith Kipyegon ran within a second of Wang Junxia’s 1993 8:06.11 mark, ultimately falling just short with a heroic 8:07.04 effort. You’ve gotta feel for the commentators in that moment—how do you professionally but accurately describe what just happened? “Congrats to Faith Kipyegon, who ran a time everyone thinks is the clean world record, but isn’t, because despite the mountain of evidence, an almost-definitely-doped mark is still officially on the books?” It’s as awkward as the giant blue elephant, to say the least.

The 400m hurdles were both defined, as they often are these days, by the question “can X beat their rival Y, who’s not even here?” Fortunately for Femke Bol, who ran a world-leading 51.91 to win by a 1.69-second margin, her great rival Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone is focused on the flat 400m this year. Karsten Warholm, however, will have to face off with Olympic champ Rai Benjamin in a month’s time, and he did his very best to put the pressure back on Benjamin to perform with a stunning 46.28 run in Silesia. That’s the fastest non-championship time in history and third-fastest ever, behind Warlhom and Benjamin’s respective personal-best runs at the Tokyo Olympics.

Prior to Silesia, Warholm had taken an uncharacteristic two-month break from racing, leading some to wonder if a secret injury had derailed his season, but clearly it was the exact opposite: the 2024 silver medalist was putting in WORK to give Benjamin the best possible fight come Worlds.

Before the international broadcast even switched on, another big star returned from a much longer break from racing. Olympic 800m champ Keely Hodgkinson hadn’t competed in over a year, entering then withdrawing from what felt like dozens of meets as she nursed a hamstring injury. When she finally did toe the line, however, it was no rust-buster: Hodgkinson blasted a 1:54.74 world lead, the second-fastest time of her career and the fifth-fastest of this century. In a little less than two minutes of work, Hodgkinson put to rest any doubt that she’s still the heavy favorite for the win in Tokyo.

Here, the elephant-in-the-room comparison is, of course, another lightly-raced 800m phenom: Athing Mu-Nikolayev. For most of this decade, Mu-Nikolayev and Hodgkinson have been forced to play the comparison game, but for good reason: they’re the same age (both 23 years old, born two months apart), came up on the international scene around the same time, and from 2021-2023, accounted for two of the three podium spots in every championship. Hodgkinson and Mu-Nikoyalev aren’t quite coming into 2025 on the same note. For Hodgkinson, it was riding the high of Olympic gold, and for Mu-Nikolayev, it was coming back from a devastating fall at the U.S. Trials, but they share the burden of sky-high expectations while they quietly worked their way back into race shape. Unfortunately for Mu-Nikolayev, the comparison is now looking less and less favorable as Hodgkinson appears well-positioned to even the score at two global golds apiece.

In track and field, as in life, context matters. There was a whole lot of baggage attached to the performances in Silesia (and we’re not even getting into the latest round of Twitter intrigue), and the fireworks, both literal and figurative, were made all the brighter if you knew the whole story. Racing with an elephant in the room makes for intriguing matchups when off-the-track tension collides with on-the-track performance… so next year, let’s double down on the drama and cut down on the mascots’ screentime.

How Will The Last Two Diamond Leagues Affect The Final Championship Picture? 💎💎

The clock is running out on the track and field regular season, and rather than limp to the finish line, it’ll wrap up with a manic sprint. In a few short hours, action kicks off in Lausanne, Switzerland, before the Diamond League circus heads north to Belgium on Friday. The last standing points will be spoken for and the fields will be set for next week’s Diamond League final in Zurich, where athletes stand to win up to $50,000 in prize money and a wild-card berth to the World Championship.

The sprints will continue to be defined, at least partially, by the absence of two big names, as neither Kishane Thompson nor Julien Alfred will be in action. Olympic champ Noah Lyles continues to race back into shape, which is bad news for some because if he contests and wins the DL final in the 100m, that’s one less wild card for everyone else. Lyles is running the 100m in Lausanne but hasn’t shared his racing plans beyond then.

Brussels will feature another look at Melissa Jefferson-Wooden and Sha’Carri Richardson, but this time they’ll be taking on the great Shelly-Ann Fraser-Pryce over 100m. SAFP’s main highlight of the season has been a 10.91 third-place finish at the Jamaican Trials, but since then, she hasn’t broken 11 seconds or won a race, so she’ll likely be eager for a time and place improvement here. It’d be surprising to see her take down Jefferson-Wooden, but Jamaican and American sprint fans alike will be analyzing every step of her and Richardson’s races for signs of podium potential. For SAFP, that means a top-end speed in the middle meters that can supplement her historically unmatchable start, and for Sha’Carri, that means staying in her drive phase longer than two steps.

Speaking of women’s sprints, the 200m will feature a preview of two of the Americans with the best hopes of snagging a spot in Tokyo via Zurich. Brittany Brown and McKenzie Long—who finished fourth and fifth with the same time, 22.20, at USAs—are entered in Lausanne and are currently ranked sixth and seventh, one point behind fellow American Jenna Prandini in the DL standings. Strong runs here from the duo would not only secure their spots on the Zurich start line, but also shed some light on who may have the best shot at winning the whole shebang next week. (In practice, Brown really has two shots at a spot as Anavia Battle, who finished second at USAs, is also second in the Diamond League standings, and her win would also get Brown on the team.)

Similarly, Brussels will feature Vernon Norwood and Jacory Patterson in the 400m. Norwood, the fourth placer from USAs, has three paths to a wild card if Patterson, the U.S. champ, gets into the DL final (he’s currently ninth) and either they or Chris Bailey (U.S. runner up currently leading the DL standings) comes out with the win.

American distance fans will be glued to the TV (or whatever janky streaming situation you have hooked up at home) for the latter half of Lausanne, which features Graham Blanks and Grant Fisher in the 5000m (plus U.S.-based Guatemalan Luis Grijalva) and Bryce Hoppel and Josh Hoey in the 800m. Friday’s program will feature two 1500ms and a women’s 5000m, plus a weird quasi-world record attempt with Winfred Yavi in the rarely-run steeplechase mile. Yared Nuguse is entered in the Brussels 1500m with high hopes, since his path to Tokyo necessarily runs through the Diamond League final, but since he’s now comfortably in fourth after his win in Silesia, it’s not a do-or-die. With no Gudaf Tsegay, Beatrice Chebet, or Faith Kipyegon on the start list, the women’s 1500m offers a rare chance at an American DL win (Nikki Hiltz, Sinclaire Johnson, and Heather MacLean are entered), but they’ll have to go through the likes of Nelly Chepchirchir (undefeated on the season) and Diribe Welteji (3:51.44 SB) first.

Intriguingly, Grant Holloway is not on the entry list for the 110m hurdles in Lausanne. Normally, Holloway is one of the safest bets for a win in pretty much any race he starts, but Holloway has had the rockiest season of his pro career to date. He’s been relatively consistent—running between 13.11 and 13.18 in five rounds of racing since June—but hasn’t returned to the highest of highs we’ve seen from the 4x global champion with a 12.81 PB and has yet to win a single 110H final this season. Holloway is not in line for a lane in Zurich, so it’s entirely possible that we won’t get any more data points out of the Olympic champ until the first round of racing in Tokyo.

When the dust settles on tracks across Europe this weekend, we’ll have our clearest picture yet of who’s a true contender and who’s a long shot for a coveted World gold. We’re officially seven days out from the DL final and a mere 24 away from the first rounds of racing in Tokyo, so while there could be some clutch surprise performances on the horizon yet, we generally have a pretty good sense of the pecking order by this time in the season. But that doesn’t make these next few days of racing boring; just the opposite: the narrowing window for change just means that every one of these performances becomes more and more indicative of what we can expect when medals are on the line.

Let’s Talk About NACAC 🌎

In a confounded Jerry Seinfeld standup special voice

WHAT’S THE DEAL WITH NACAC?

No. Seriously. What’s the deal with NACAC?

In recent weeks, the NACAC Track & Field Championships have been alluded to here as a magical source of world ranking points or a means for on-the-cusp athletes to secure their spots on Team USA. And NACAC is very much those things. But in theory, it’s a whole lot more.

Acronym-ally, NACAC stands in for “North American, Central American, and Caribbean,” meaning it’s the World Athletics area association for nations fully located within the Western hemisphere that aren’t considered part of South America. Given that global track and field powerhouses like Canada, Jamaica, and the United States fall under that umbrella, you might expect the NACAC Track & Field Championships to be a real barnburner of a meet… Well, it’s sort of not. 

It isn’t exactly a bad meet either. It just sort of exists. At the 2025 edition, held this past weekend, there were some highlights for sure, but it’s not the supermeet that comparable competitions like the European Championships can deliver. 

Dan Michalski got his World standard, going 8:14.07 for the win and Taylor Roe shored up her ranking by soloing a 32:19.84 10,000m; Handal Roban of Penn State and St. Vincent bested the likes of Brandon Miller with a jaw-dropping 1:42.87 800m PB; Curtis Thompson put on a clinic in the javelin, winning by 10 meters thanks to an 87.24m throw; and Jamaica’s Nikisha Pryce (49.95) emerged victorious in the women’s 400m, the most competitive event top-to-bottom at NACACs.

Clearly the potential for NACAC to be one of the most exciting meets on the annual track and field calendar is there. But there are some glaring issues that are preventing that reality.

The first and most literal problem is that NACAC is not an annually held championship. In fact, since the organization’s founding in 1988, there have only been five senior track and field championship events, taking place at odd and perhaps cicada-inspired intervals (2007, 2015, 2018, 2022, and 2025). This strange cadence is—partially—explained by the existence of the more heralded Pan American Games and a series of national sub-federations that sometimes seem to host championships of their own.

In terms of still-existent and now-defunct track and field championships with participatory overlap to NACAC, there’s OECS (Organization of Eastern Caribbean States), CARIFTA (Caribbean Free Trade Association), and even the Commonwealth Games. All these additional acronyms segue us nicely into another issue plaguing NACAC and the sport in general: there are too many meets and not enough high-level strategic thought about how the broader athletics ecosystem ought to function.

At first blush, it seems sensible to slot an area championship in between national meets and Worlds. But if you want an area championship to entice an area’s best athletes to compete at NACAC, you probably shouldn’t schedule it at a point in the season where its most compelling draw (a World Athletics ranking point bonanza, given its “GL” placing score bonuses) only really matters to cuspy Worlds qualifiers.

This year’s NACACs would probably be a more attractive meet for top-tier sprinters if it had been held ahead of national championships and it provided event champions an automatic spot at Worlds, as was the case at April’s South American Championships. Imagine a NACACs where a fourth-place-caliber Jamaican or American 100m runner is competing like their season depended on it!

To sweeten the pot for distance and middle-distance athletes, though, NACAC would probably need to revisit its host city. The last two installments of the meet have been held in Freeport, a city of under 30,000 in the Bahamas. Holding any race above 800m this close to the tropics is inherently going to make for tactical racing, as evinced by the men’s 5000m meet record—13:57.53, set by Lopez Lomong a decade ago. 

Of course, there are more significant obstacles in place to NACACs becoming as hotly contested as Euros. The pool of federations is smaller, there’s less nation-to-nation parity, and a meet in Europe is less geographically isolated from comparable opportunities on the pro racing circuit. Europe occupies a smaller area, athletes intermingle more in training groups and in competition, and there are other sports that hold popular, continent-wide national competitions there as well.

There’s inherent unfairness in an athletic competition between the generally tiny and regionally compact OECS countries (the largest by population being Guadeloupe and its roughly 390,000 residents) and nations like the U.S. (340 million or so residents). Getting America, Jamaica, Canada, and the likes excited about NACACs would require some tweaking of the meet’s timing and incentive structure. But the smaller countries of NACAC will always show up and show out—the chance to take down Goliath tends to be reason enough to participate. 

That still holds true even if the big dogs only send their second biggest dogs. The fifth best 200m specialist from Jamaica… the likely fourth-place finisher in the 1500m at the Canadian championships… the seventh(?) best American shot putter… for the vast majority of athletes around the globe, upsetting this caliber of star while wearing their own country’s name across their chest—even at an area championship—would be a career defining moment. And we can’t discount the value of an opportunity to wear the national colors for the big countries’ not-quite-Olympians. 

Making NACACs an annual or biennial thing, and one that gives global medal threats a reason to show up, would go a long way toward giving the sport something it desperately needs: more meets that actually matter.

More News From The Track And Field World 📰

– The Chicago Marathon elite fields have been announced, and while there’s a Ruth Chepngetich-sized hole the coordinators were left to fill, they did a nice job doing it in the aggregate. Despite the depth of talent on the list, no woman in the race has won a World Marathon Major before, so we’ll see a breakthrough champion no matter what. And if the winner runs crazy fast we’ll dedicate a future issue to a Moneyball-inspired spec script that’s all about creating this field. John Korir returns to defend his crown with grand time ambitions, but he’ll be challenged by a stout field which includes eight other men with sub-2:05 PBs. 

– Not to be outdone, the New York City Marathon fields have also been announced, and plenty of eyes throughout the five boroughs will be locked on the battle between 2023 race champion Helen Obiri and last year’s winner, Sharon Lokedi. Reigning Olympic bronze medalist Benson Kipruto headlines the men’s field. There are plenty more intriguing entries, but one notable name is Molly Seidel, who hasn’t raced a marathon since Chicago in 2023.

– Amon Kemboi of Kenya (and formerly Campbell then Arkansas) won the Falmouth Road Race in 31:12, which we assume is an excellent seven-mile time. Melknat Wudu of Ethiopia held off American Emma Grace Hurley, 36:03 to 36:04. Kemboi also placed third in the Falmouth Mile, held two days earlier where Luke Houser won in 3:55.15. Angel Piccirillo won the women’s race in 4:27.97; mile third-place finisher Eleanor Fulton had the most successful double for the women, finishing as the seventh American on Sunday.

– Is it still “trackflation” if it happens on a series of dirt roads and trails in Colorado? Anne Flower broke a 31-year-old course record at last weekend’s Leadville 100 Mile, running 17:58:19 to finish second overall. She’s a 35-year-old full-time ER doc and was making her 100-mile debut – talk about impressive. The only athlete to beat her? David Roche (15:12:30), who also broke the course record, set just last year, by… well, David Roche.

– Beef: patched. DL Final lane: snatched. Noah Lyles, fresh of allegedly patching things up with Kenny Bednerek, has been granted an “international wild card” entry into the Diamond League 200m final.

– Beef: elevated. Gabby Thomas had some choice thoughts about the state of clean sport, posting that she believes coaches with a history of anti-doping violations should face lifetime bans. Clearly, she’s been reading up on the coach of many of her prime rivals.

– Japan’s Rachid Muratake made the men’s 110m hurdles situation even more interesting, blasting a 12.92 at the Athlete Night Games in Fukui, good for the second fastest time in the world this year.

– Athlos NYC has announced that Nikki Hiltz will be headlining a mile race at its 2025 event. Last year, the meet featured a 1500m won by Faith Kipyegon. 

– And to conclude on a bummer, Maryna Bekh-Romanchuk of Ukraine (a Fedrico Rosa athlete) got popped for testosterone in a December 2024 out-of-competition drug test, and has been banned for four years. Okay—have a nice Wednesday!

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