Happy Worlds Eve-Eve ⏱️

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Compiled by David Melly and Paul Snyder

The Most And Least Predictable Events At Worlds 🔮

It’s nearly here! The 2025 World Championships are two days away (…or three, depending on where you live relative to the international date line)! Regardless, if you’re reading this moments after it hits your inbox, the first events are a mere 62 hours away.

Over the next two weeks, 43 events will take place inside Tokyo’s National Stadium (plus a few marathons and race walks partially outside of it) to decide once and for all who the fastest/strongest/springiest athletes in the world are this year. Like all great championships, the beauty of Worlds is that everything that came before it gets tossed out the window alongside rabbits, Wavelights, and pre-established pecking orders, and medals are handed out based on one critical performance.

The CITIUS MAG team is rolling out full previews of every single event for your reading pleasure (busy week for your inbox!), but there’s still so much to unpack from a fanalytical perspective—a word we just made up that happens to perfectly describe this newsletter. Some events are intriguingly murky; others are looking like a one-athlete race against the clock. But even in the events with the biggest locks, something crazy can still happen…

First, the most predictable events on the docket – where one athlete’ victory is practically a foregone conclusion.

Women’s 400m hurdles: It’s brave of us to start out this newsletter with the bold assertion that there’s NO FREAKING WAY Femke Bol loses now that Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone has opted for the flat 400m… because the other woman who beat her in Paris, Anna Cockrell, is on the start line. With that asterisk out of the way, Bol is still the defending World champ and has the fastest PB in the field by 0.63 seconds, well ahead of Dalilah Muhammad’s 51.58. She’s also the only woman under 52 seconds this year and has eight of the ten fastest times run in 2025. One of those other marks is Sydney’s. The other belongs to Canadian Savannah Sutherland, who capped off her collegiate career by breaking SML’s NCAA record with a 52.46 run.

The Paris Olympic final was the confluence of a significant underperformance by Bol and a near-perfect day by Cockrell. The American’s silver-medal-winning run was a huge PB and remains her only lifetime sub-52 outing, compared with Bol, who’s run under 52 seven times but only ran 52.15 in the final. Bol was chasing after McLaughlin-Levrone and paid the price; she’ll have the luxury of setting the tone in this race.  

Bol’s head-to-head records also tell a compelling story: Against Muhammad, she’s 7-2 and her last loss came in 2021. Against Cockrell, she’s 7-1—although that one was, of course, last year’s Olympic final. And she’s never lost to Sutherland, but has only raced her in two finals. It’s not an impossibility that Cockrell, Sutherland, or Muhammad upsets Bol, but that’s just what it’d be: an upset. 

Men’s pole vault, women’s discus, women’s long jump: These events are grouped together not because they all take place inside the oval, but because in each one the favorite is riding an impressively long win streak. Mondo Duplantis, Valarie Allman, and Tara Davis-Woodhall all last lost a competition in 2023, although for the latter two, that loss came at the World Championships. Extra motivation for Allman and Davis-Woodhall to not get too comfortable atop their respective thrones! Both may be Olympic champions, but neither has a World gold, so the opportunity to expand their resume to new territory can’t be missed. For Mondo, the story will likely once again revert to how historically high he can push himself; but an outright loss to a competitor feels unfathomable.

Women’s 800m: Just one month ago, the women’s 800m would’ve been nowhere near the “most predictable” section, as reigning World champ Mary Moraa was having a rocky year, American record holder Athing Mu-Nikolayev missed the U.S. team, and Olympic champ Keely Hodgkinson kept pulling out of meets. But when Hodgkinson did return to her first 800m race in over a year, she did so without any lingering indication of her hamstring injury, and she ran the two fastest times in the world in back-to-back races, winning a pair of Diamond Leagues in 1:54.74 and 1:55.69.

The 800m is a notoriously unpredictable event, so predicting on the basis of two results is a bit of a swing, so if we may hedge, just a little... The meteoric rise of Swiss 21-year-old Audrey Werro could continue, as she improved her PB from 1:57.25 to 1:55.91 in two races and won the Diamond League final. But another 1+ second jump against a much more experienced racer feels unlikely, so if the final in Tokyo is a fast one, Hodgkinson is once again in the driver’s seat.

On the other end of the spectrum, some of the most exciting races on the calendar are those where things could go any of a dozen different directions:

Men’s 1500m: We’ve burned through a lot of newsletter ink on this event already, but it’s such a dramatic, closely-packed event that it’s worth spilling a bit more. The general consensus is that Niels Laros’s last month of racing has officially cemented his place as the favorite, but a gold medal is far from a sure thing as the 20-year-old—who’s never finished higher than sixth in a global final—takes on the current World champion (Josh Kerr), current Olympic champion (Cole Hocker), past World champion (Timothy Cheruiyot), past Olympic champion (Jakob Ingebrigtsen), and fastest man in the world this year (Azeddine Habz). Seven different men have won Diamond League races this year, and none of those seven are Hocker, Kerr, or Ingebrigtsen.

There’s a reason why the last eight global finals in this event have produced eight different winners. The competition keeps getting better and the margins between the top contenders is razor thin, coming down to who has the best positioning and the absolute best legs on the day. Laros is the safest bet based on recent form, but until the first few rounds of racing kick off, we have absolutely no idea what to expect from Ingebrigtsen, who hasn’t raced since indoors, and Hocker and Kerr, who’ve largely been absent from the late-summer circuit. The sheer number of unknowns only makes this already-exciting event more thrilling.

Men’s and women’s high hurdles: Olympic champs Masai Russell and Grant Holloway are both heading to Tokyo looking to follow up their banner 2024 with another statement victory, but there are question marks around both American hurdle stars. Russell took second to Nadine Visser in her most recent 100m hurdles race, a cold, rainy affair in Lausanne, but beyond that she’s had her most consistent year to date, including an American record run at Grand Slam: Miami back in May. But while Russell won the U.S. title, she’s only one for four in Diamond League races this season. Russell is clearly a gametime player in championships, but the competition is so strong in the 100m hurdles these days that even an A-minus day may not be enough with the likes of Grace Stark, Ackera Nugent, and Tobi Amusan right there, too.

Holloway, as we mentioned last week, has his work cut out for him thanks to Cordell Tinch’s ascendence to the top of the hurdling heap this season. But Tinch has a much shorter championship resume, with only one appearance at Worlds in 2023, where he didn’t make it out of the semifinals. If Holloway does pick up his fourth straight global title, it’ll be his most impressive yet as for once he’s not heading into Worlds with a season full of dominance under his belt. And it’s entirely possible that an American that isn’t either Tinch or Holloway wins, given that Ja’Kobe Tharp took the victory at USAs and Dylan Beard has beaten them each twice apiece this season.

Women’s 200m: With Olympic champ Gabby Thomas out of Worlds with an injury, the two clearest favorites in this one are Julien Alfred and Melissa Jefferson-Wooden. But both are generally known more to be 100-meter specialists—who’s leveled up to higher highs in the longer sprints? And what about World champ Shericka Jackson, who hasn’t exactly looked like herself this season? Could she be saving her best stuff for Tokyo? Alfred, the Olympic silver medalist, is probably the betting favorite here, but while her return to racing in the Diamond League 100m final went smoothly she also had a brief injury setback in August, which shouldn’t be entirely discounted.

Another true X factor is Olympic bronze medalist Brittany Brown, who finished fourth at USAs but has steadily raced her way into better and better shape since, culminating with a victory of her own at the DL final. If Alfred or Jefferson-Wooden falters, she’s the most consistent performer on their heels, and she’s got two global medals to prove it.

But there’s also a weird third thing: events where the top few finishers are nearly certain, but who ends up with gold couldn’t be less clear.

Women’s 5000m: Here, the reigning World champ and reigning Olympic champ are two of the most dominant athletes in history: Faith Kipyegon and Beatrice Chebet. They’re both world record holders, and they’re both likely untouchable in the first events on their calendar: the 1500m for Kipyegon and the 10,000m for Chebet. Chebet got the better of Kipyegon in Paris and seems to have only gotten better since, but let’s not forget that Kipyegon got in a bit of an argy-bargy with Gudaf Tsegay in that race that may have knocked her off her game. It’ll be a real treat to watch two of the best ever go at it, but who comes out on top is anyone’s guess.

Men’s 400m hurdles: Much like the 5000m, the reigning World champ and Olympic champ are highly likely to go 1-2: Karsten Warholm (also the world record holder) and Rai Benjamin. After finishing second to Benjamin in Paris last summer and a well-beaten third in Stockholm in June, some may have wondered if Warholm’s final victory over Benjamin had already taken place and the baton had truly been passed off. But Warholm came back from a short summer break with a vengeance, clocking a stunning 46.28 world lead in Poland. No one has ever run that fast outside of a global final before, so all of a sudden Benjamin’s favorite status felt a lot less certain.

At this point, it does seem like those two have managed to separate a tiny bit from their third musketeer, 2022 World champ Alison dos Santos, but dos Santos did beat Benjamin at the Prefontaine Classic so he can’t be counted out. One thing’s for sure: it would be crazy to see anyone else crack that podium without a fall or some other disaster.

Women’s 400m: Another event where the podium feels pre-set is the women’s 400m, where Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone’s inter-event transfer puts her on a collision course with Olympic champ Marileidy Paulino and world leader Salwa Eid Naser. McLaughlin-Levrone will need to elevate her game to truly contend with Paulino (48.17 PB) and Naser (48.14 PB), but that’s exciting news for anyone who wants to see SML’s true potential in her new(ish) event—and anyone who wants to see Sanya Richards-Ross’s 48.70 American record finally fall.

Naser has had the most variance in performance of the three, with sub-49 runs in both March and August but a few duds in between, usually in bad weather, but with warm temperatures forecast for Tokyo, it’s likely she’ll be on the higher end of her capabilities unless she goes out way too hard and fizzles (which does happen, too). By contrast, Paulino always seems to have the extra gear she needs at the end of races, and how McLaughlin-Levrone decides to approach pacing and racing against her two biggest threats to gold is a mystery heretofore unknown to everyone not named Bobby Kersee.

So whether you’re rooting for the favorite to dominate, hoping against hope for the big upset, or betting tricky odds on an unpredictable outcome, there will be a little something for every kind of fanalyst at this year’s World Championships. Just don’t get confused by all the time zone changes and miss your favorite event’s final.

Don’t Sleep On Gracie Morris 👀

If you found yourself trying to cross the street in the Upper East Side last Sunday or turned your television set to your local ABC7 coverage, you probably asked yourself two questions: “Is the Fifth Avenue Mile today?” and “Wait, who’s Gracie Morris?”

Usually the unofficial end to the middle-distance racing season, the 44th running of this race may have snuck up on you because, oddly, it precedes the World Championships this year. Most years, this race serves as a homecoming of sorts for Olympians, World medalists, and Eurotrippers who just finished up their summer racing seasons and are hoping to use the final bit of juice in their legs to pick up one last check before riding off into a postseason break that begins with karaoke and ends with a free trip to Hawaii.

But this time, the 20-block southbound commute was sandwiched squarely between the Diamond League final and the first rounds in Tokyo. 

On the men’s side, a tightly packed race yielded a thrilling shuffle of the places in the final meters, where Parker Wolfe nearly came away with the victory but Yared Nuguse managed to find another gear and finish his season on a high note, winning in 3:48. Behind them, Drew Hunter kept the podiums entirely American by edging out Irishman Nick Griggs and Kenyan Festus Lagat by 0.3 seconds.

For most of the women’s race, it looked like a one-runner show as defending champ Karissa Schweizer went out hard and gapped most of the field, with Puma Elite’s Gracie Morris trying to stick on her tail but trailing for most of the race by a few meters. But Morris, who only finished ninth in the 1500m at USAs but bounced back to win the Sir Walter Miler in a 4:23.74 PB, could never fully be dropped and ended up overhauling Schweizer as she tired to take the win in 4:16. Schweizer ended up getting pipped at the line by Kayley DeLay as well, a strong run from the Brooks steeplechase specialist.

Unless you’re an avid reader of our newsletter highlights or a diehard TCU fan, Gracie Morris may not be a household name in your home. She’s set PBs in the 800m, 1500m, and mile in her first year as a pro, but as a collegian, she never finished higher than 16th at NCAAs and her 1500m best in college was 4:10.35. Morris is only the fourth Fifth Avenue Mile winner, male or female, in the last 20 years to not be an Olympian, and the first since Eric Jenkins’s 2016 victory.

But wait… how often does Fifth Avenue happen before the World Championships? Weren’t the fields super watered as a result? It’s a fair criticism, particularly given the extremely close proximity between the two events this year. In 2019, Fifth Ave preceded Worlds in Doha, but the gap was nearly a month—plenty of time for Jenny Simpson to claim her eighth title and recover to finish eighth in the 1500m final. And it’s true that many of the players you’d usually see at Central Park East this time of year are currently halfway around the world. But Morris was only the fifth seed by mile PB or seventh by 1500m PB, racing against two U.S. steeplechase champs (Val Constien and Krissy Gear), two 4:00 1500m runners (Schweizer and Dani Jones), and a handful of speedy 800m specialists like Ajee’ Wilson and Raevyn Rogers.

This was no kicker’s race, either. Thanks to Schweizer taking things out hot and giving Morris a target to chase, she crossed the finish line in 4:15.5 (officially 4:16 as road results are rounded up to the nearest second). That’s the third fastest winning mark in history, just off the 4:14.8 course record run twice, by Schweizer in 2024 and Laura Muir in 2022. Of course, “trackflation” applies to road miles as well and times are generally getting faster, but Morris did run faster than Simpson, Regina Jacobs, Shannon Rowbury, and Mary Decker Slaney ever did on the course, and they’re all former Fifth Ave champs with sub-four minute 1500m PBs. Morris’s, for the moment, is only 4:04.05.

So was Morris’s victory a fluke win in a fluke year, or a performance we’ll look back on in a few seasons as the start of something big? Based on the rest of the freshman-pro’s trajectory this year, it’s more likely the latter. The move to North Carolina has clearly agreed with Morris, and while she’s still hovering on the border of truly contending for U.S. teams in the middle distances, the possibility is not looking nearly as far off as it once did.

So if you were trying to cross the street in New York last weekend and nearly got run down by Morris’s big kick, remember her name. Maybe you just got a story you’ll be telling your grandkids one day about crossing paths with America’s next great miler.

Was 2025’s Pro Racing Schedule A Success? 🗓️

Look, we’re going to level with you here. When we sat down to write this week’s newsletter, we’d entirely forgotten about the World Athletics Continental Tour’s concluding category ‘A’ “Gold” competition, which took place on Sunday in Beijing. Upon remembering this meet existed, we checked the results and were underwhelmed. 

“Is this something we really need to write about?” we collectively moaned. And yet here we are. So why write at all about a meet we didn’t even consider following this weekend? 

Well, based on World Athletics’s ongoing desire to push its best athletes to high-point-value competitions, Continental Tour meets are supposed to provide many of the best global competitive opportunities for athletes who for whatever reason didn’t want to sign up for or weren’t given a spot in Diamond League offerings. Unless Grand Slam Track becomes the recipient of a near-magical cash-infused resuscitation, the Continental Tour will likely remain the uncontested “next best place to race” going forward. If you’re asking WA, we as the track and field community allegedly care more about these meets than NCAAs or national championships.

And if we are going to return more of our attention to meets like the Kip Keino Classic, the Paavo Nurmi Games, and Ostrava Golden Spike, then we also need to be constructively critical when this loose federation of meets does something wacky. And so, friends, it’s with love in our hearts that we say hosting the de facto equivalent meet in your series to the DL final during what’s basically a dead week for the sport is not the way to go about elevating your offering.

Back to Beijing: It’s not that there weren’t outstanding athletes in attendance. (Gold medal threat Sarah Mitton took top honors in the shot, for instance.) It’s just that this meet shouldn’t have been held this past weekend at all. The Diamond League final was—in the eyes of… well… everybody—the end of track and field’s “regular season” and the upcoming World Championship serves as the sport’s entire playoffs. Anything slotted in between is going to inherently feel like a bizarre exhibition. In the American high school or collegiate ranks you might call it a “last chance meet,” but for the pros at this point in the year, there is literally nothing at stake, aside from one final tuneup or maybe the chance to nab some heavily inflated World Athletics points for next year. But that’s what practice, and next year’s regular season meets, respectively, are for!

Let’s touch on Grand Slam Track for a moment: if we learned anything from it beyond “be generally skeptical of the next person to brand themselves a savior of the sport,” it’s that giving athletes a reason to lace up and compete hard early in the season is a great thing! The gap from World Indoors to any other professional meets of consequence would have been pretty gaping without GST luring global medalists out of their training dungeons. Sure, that might be a harder sell next year, but maybe the Continental Tour can find some utility and help out a bit.

At its best, the Continental Tour works in harmony with the Diamond League, providing additional racing opportunities for developing elite athletes who haven’t quite earned their lane on the DL circuit, or for seasoned medal threats who strategically want to compete outside of the brightest lights. As its name implies, the non-competition goal of the series is to expand the global influence of track to areas that don’t have a ready-made DL-level offering — yet.

This year, the first meets on the Tour that earned World Athletics ‘A’ classifications started in late March—in Australia and Botswana—with the first truly well attended ones picking up in May, starting in Zagreb, Croatia. Next year, why not attempt to coordinate a schedule switch-up where the first Euro meet takes place earlier? It’s commendable that World Athletics is working to bolster the sport’s infrastructure away from the well-established competitions of Europe, but when it comes time to transition from indoor to outdoor track, we really should open things up with more of a bang, in easier to reach locales that are also closer to prominent training hubs. (That probably means an American meet once again taking up the financial mantle and checking the necessary boxes to be classified as a Continental Tour Gold label affair.)

From there, go nuts with meets all over the place! Because come May, when World rankings and standards suddenly feel like must-attain commodities, athletes will clamor for the chance to compete in the best meets that will have them. Ideally, the conclusion of the Tour comes before the Diamond League final. Athletes could qualify for Worlds this year in certain events via Continental Tour standings, but that path was so poorly publicized that plenty of potentially impacted athletes didn’t even know about it. Going forward, beat that drum loudly and often, and maybe even open up a lane in other events in the Diamond League final for athletes who have performed exceptionally well on the Tour.

Treat it as a sort of Triple-A league for the sport’s top echelon, where hungry young guns can win their way to the big times, and grizzly vets can sort out some kinks before opening their seasons in earnest. Most Tour meet organizers already understand the assignment, but to further sweeten the pot—and get directors working the phones with agents even harder—what about a relegation system not unlike what’s present in some levels of soccer? The Continental Tour meet that produces the most World Athletics points in aggregate becomes a Diamond League meet the following year, and the worst performing Diamond League meet gets bumped down. Good luck getting that idea off the ground, but hey, there are no bad ideas in brainstorming or newsletter writing.

The World Championships taking place in September has made this season a particularly compelling one, since regular season performances at the Diamond League actually mattered a whole lot more than usual. And since we got that right, we really should aim to align every other tier of professional track and field with it, too. Some of these proposals are probably too lofty to quickly implement, but at the same time, even if we just do away with weird floating meets that athletes and fans alike can largely ignore, we’re making progress.

More News From The Track And Field World 📰

– The annual and very coolly named half marathon Great North Run took place just outside of Newcastle, and Alexander Munyao (1:00:52) and Sheila Chepkirui (1:09:32) claimed the outright titles. Ben Connor (1:02:57) and Eilish McColgan (1:09:42) were the top finishers from the UK.

– Michelino Sunseri, a professional trail runner, has been found guilty in a federal trial for his use of a shortcut while pursuing the FKT (fastest known time) up and back down Wyoming’s Grand Teton mountain. (Yes, this is clickbait, and yes, there’s slightly more nuance to the story, although it’s perhaps a sort of confounding outcome.)

– College cross-country is officially back underway, although not much of note has happened yet. Both men’s and women’s defending champions raced at the same meet, however… because that’s also known as a BYU home meet these days.

– Adjust your media 800 bets accordingly: Chris Chavez sustained a knee injury while moving into his new apartment, and will not be able to compete in Tokyo.

– Mary Cain? The author? The former U.S. junior phenom has announced that her memoirThis Is Not About Running is coming out on April 28th, 2026.

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