🎵 What A Wonderful World(s) 🎵

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Compiled by David Melly and Paul Snyder

Was This The Most Unpredictable Worlds Of All Time? 😵‍💫

Another World Championships is in the bag, and what a nine-day week it was. The discus ring in Tokyo’s National Stadium may still be drying out, but with the benefit of a few decent nights’ worth of sleep to shake the jetlag, we feel prepared to reflect on the madness.

More than any meet in recent memory, this one felt full of surprises. The oddsmakers and prognosticators were left scratching their heads and re-sorting their spreadsheets as in event after event, the favorite was felled by a relative unknown. In no event group was this more apparent than the men’s distance events, where only one event—the men’s 800m—produced a fairly expected outcome. The others?

Isaac Nader took the 1500m, Geordie Beamish dethroned Soufiane El Bakkali in the steeple, Cole Hocker won the 5000m, Jimmy Gressier won the 10,000m, and Alphonce Simbu won the marathon. 

To be fair, none of these guys are complete unknowns: Nader and Gressier won Diamond League races this season, Hocker and Beamish have gold medals in other events (1500m indoors and out), and Simbu was the bronze medalist back in 2017. But this was certainly not the collection we expected going in.

If there’s any federation that needs to take a hard look in the mirror after Tokyo, it’s Ethiopia. Kenyan women won every event from 800m up through the marathon, whereas Ethiopian athletes only claimed four medals total, two silvers and two bronzes. The men fared particularly poorly, with Yomif Kejelcha’s silver in the 10,000m the only highlight and all three marathoners DNFing.

If you want to look on the bright side, Ethiopian track fans, things can turn around very quickly. This time last year, Jamaica’s sprint ranks were undergoing a similar post-mortem after only winning two medals in Paris, but this season couldn’t be any different: all the surprises were positive, as Jamaica went 1-2 in the men’s 100m and claimed 10 medals overall. Even more promisingly, Shelly-Ann Fraser-Pryce’s farewell tour coincided with a wave of new young talent getting the job done: Oblique Seville (24 years old), Bryan Levell (21 years old), and Tina Clayton (21 years old) all picked up their first medals.

Tokyo was full of memorable see-it-to-believe-it moments, but was it statistically an unusual Worlds? It’s hard to say conclusively, but here’s one way of looking at it. We looked at the last three Olympic cycles to see how many individual gold medalists repeated year-over-year, and based on that metric alone, it was a slightly more unpredictable championship than standard.

2016-2017: 12 repeat champs

2021-2022: 13 repeat champs

2024-2025: 10 repeat champs

That said, the heavy favorites did get the job done in more than a few events. Three athletes completed the “Tokyo-Tokyo sweep”, winning every global championship from 2021 to 2025: Ryan Crouser, Faith Kiypegon, and Mondo Duplantis, the latter of whom set another pole vault world record (of course). Two of the sport’s brightest stars pulled off impressive doubles: Melissa Jefferson-Wooden in the sprints, and Beatrice Chebet in the distance events, and the indefatigable Noah Lyles picked up three more medals, two of them gold.

It’s hard to call anything Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone does a surprise at this point, as pretty much every time she’s toed the line in a championship she proves that the sky is her only personal limit. But it was still a “holy shit” moment to see her shatter Sanya Richards-Ross’s American record in the SEMI-final, and then shatter that record—along with the 48-second barrier—in the final. Without dwelling too much on the negative, it is a huge bummer that performances like Sydney’s in the 400m, Lilian Odira’s in the 800m, and Ethan Katzberg’s in the hammer throw have to be measured up against mid-1980s Soviet-era records, but the silver lining is the closer these athletes get to 40-year-old, highly-suspect marks, the closer we can all get to a record book we feel better about.

All in all, Tokyo delivered the right mix of new arrivals and all-time greats, kooky plot twists and satisfying conclusions. Not one single event felt boring or rote; every final had at least one medalist or performance that defied expectation. While Emmanuel Wanyonyi’s win in the 800m may have been expected, as well as Djamel Sedjati and Marco Arop joining him on the podium for the second year in a row, no one would have guessed going into the championship that the fourth placer would be Irishman Cian McPhillips, breaking his national record for the second time in three days at 1:42.15.

On the final day, two of the relays provided perfect visual metaphors for the 2025 World Championships as a whole. In the women’s 4x100m, Shelly-Ann Fraser-Pryce concluded her epic, 20-year career by literally handing off the baton to Tia and Tina Clayton, ushering in the next generation of Jamaican sprinters. And, of course, they know exactly who they have to contend with, because right next to SAFP was Melissa Jefferson-Wooden, and bringing it all home was Sha’Carri Richardson. In the men’s 4x400m, Team USA scraped its way back into the final via a re-run after a messy prelim, only to still get outkicked by a young, talented Botswana team. While the Americans may have broken the overall medal record at this Worlds with 26 golds, the increasingly global nature of the sport means no one athlete, or team, or nation can get too comfortable for long.

And that’s what makes track and field so fun.

Five Of The Best Worlds Moments You May Have Missed 👏

A World Championship can feel like an embarrassment of riches for track fans and newsletter-writers alike. With so many exciting headlines and memorable performances, how do you focus on just a few?

Whether it’s Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone’s record-setting shadow or the chaos of the 1500m, it can be easy to get drowned by the content firehose and miss some of the most heartwarming, easy-to-miss but hard-to-forget moments of personal triumph and national pride that every global championship delivers.

Here are a few of the best ones:

Juleisy Angulo (javelin): We’d be shocked if more than a handful of regular Lap Count readers have ever thrown a javelin, let alone watched an entire competition from start to finish, so there’s a good chance many of you missed something really cool that happened in the women’s jav. One of the greatest things about a global championship is that despite there being obvious track and field powerhouse nations, there are always athletes hailing from a country without much of a tradition in a given event who show up, pull off something special, and become an overnight national hero. 

That’s exactly what happened for Juleisy Angulo of Ecuador, who threw PBs—and Ecuadorian national records!—in both qualifying and in the final to win the women’s javelin. Angulo entered her 2025 campaign having not competed once in 2024 while recovering from knee surgery, and boasting a modest 60.60m personal best. The now-24 year old showed promise as a junior and U23 athlete, picking up some hardware at various national and regional championships prior to this year, but when Angulo touched down in Tokyo this month, it was her first time qualifying for a global championship. But her 65.12m heave in the final was the best throw of any woman in the field, and she headed back to Ecuador as the country’s first ever World Championship female gold medalist, and first field event champion of any gender. 

Susanna Sullivan (marathon): Those who woke up early or stayed up late got a good look at American Susanna Sullivan, who led the women’s marathon for over 15 miles, mostly solo, before being overtaken by heavy hitters Peres Jepchirchir and Tigst Assefa around 30km. Sullivan then disappeared from the broadcast as fans were treated to an epic sprint finish between the 2021 Olympic champ and the second-fastest woman of all time. After Jepchirchir emerged victorious, the big story then became Julia Paternain, of Uruguay-slash-Flagstaff, who shocked the world—and herself—by securing the bronze in her second-ever marathon. Paternain is a Cinderella story unto herself, but if you followed along with Worlds you probably knew that already.

Sullivan, amazingly, did not completely crater once she lost the lead. Quite the opposite, in fact: she hung tough over the last 10km and ended up fourth in 2:28:17. Sullivan, a 35-year-old full-time teacher, recorded her highest career finish in a major or championship, and got to prove she could handle the tough weather conditions after finishing 58th in Budapest in 2023. It’s hard to compare times across courses, but between her 2:21:56 finish in Chicago last fall and the fact that she was just three minutes behind a 2:11 runner in Tokyo, it’s safe to say that Sullivan deserves to be part of any conversation about the best active American marathoners.

Abderrahman Samba (400m hurdles): Veteran hurdler Abderrahman Samba, who now represents Qatar, had the unfortunate luck of being the best hurdler in the world in 2018, the only year in the last decade to not end in a global championship. Before the “Big Three” were making sub-47 look routine, Samba clocked his 46.98 personal best, which was at the time the fastest mark in the world in 26 years. He did pick up a bronze medal the following season, in Doha, but injuries and the rise of his rivals have kept Samba off the podium for the last six years.

Fast-forward to 2025, and Samba—somehow still only 30 years old—has enjoyed something of a comeback season, clocking the second-best time of his career at the Paris Diamond League and finishing second in the DL final. And while it was disappointing to see Karsten Warholm fade in the second half of the final in Tokyo, Samba was perfectly positioned to capitalize and ecstatically claimed a second bronze behind Alison dos Santos and Rai Benjamin.

Kate O’Connor (heptathlon): 24-year-old Kate O’Connor is something of a pioneer in Irish athletics, as last summer she became the first heptathlete from the nation to compete at an Olympics and holds the top eight scores in the country’s history. She first came to prominence with a Commonwealth Games silver in 2022, but was never a factor at Worlds in 2023, finishing 13th. 2025 has been her breakout year, however, as O’Connor took silver at World Indoors and improved her heptathlon PB by over 400 points in two efforts this season.

The latter was a Herculean effort in Tokyo, where O’Connor set PBs in four of seven events, including a two-second improvement on her lifetime best to wrap up the competition in the 800m, claiming Ireland’s first ever global medal in the event. She finished ahead of reigning champ Katarina Johnson-Thompson of Team GB, the very athlete who beat her at that Commonwealth Games three years ago, which surely some of her Irish fans especially appreciated for inter-isle rivalry reasons.

Sage Hurta-Klecker (800m): Sage Hurta-Klecker has become such a reliable fixture on the Diamond League racing circuit that during the regular season it can be easy to forget that she’d never represented Team USA at a championships before this year. After years of bad luck and close misses at USAs, Hurta-Klecker wasn’t about to waste her first trip in a U.S. uniform. She ran a season’s best in the semifinal to snag the last time qualifier, and in the final itself she knocked nearly two full seconds off her PB to finish fifth in 1:55.89, joining the exclusive sub-1:56 club.

Hurta-Klecker is now the third-fastest American all time behind Athing Mu-Nikolayev and Ajee’ Wilson, and while she heads home without a medal, it took a few historic runs to keep her off the podium, as the top three finishers all broke 1:55. Not bad for a debut.

All that glitters is not gold, as they say—and there were plenty of sparkling performances buried deeper in the results list than the top step of the podium. And more often than not, the breakout stars of today are the established titans of tomorrow, so learn their names now, give them a hand, and become a lifelong fan.

The Cases For And Against Fast And Slow Distance Finals 🐇🐢

The winning times from a global championship’s middle-distance and distance events can serve as something of a Rorschach test for fans. 

Does a winning 10,000m race nearly three minutes off of the world record appear to make you a malevolent little goblin? A scourge on the sport, a textbook case of cowardly, tactical, fast-forward-through-the-replay racing? Or does your brain fill in the gaps with delight—surely this race was a rich tapestry of contrasting strategies and last minute charges for glory?

When you squint in the direction of two 800m finals that came within about a second of the fastest anyone’s ever covered a half mile, do you see a figure emerging from the fog, arms outstretched in victory, having conquered the limits of what’s humanly possible? Or does the formless blob remain that—a pileup of spent bodies laid to waste by a predictable race of attrition?

Well, readers. The good news is, whatever you thought about the often tactical and occasionally hot pacing of the longer finals from Worlds, you’re all right.

Four mid-D and average-D finals played out “honestly”—the men’s and women’s 800m (in the year 2025, can you even imagine a championship 800m going tactical?), the women’s steeple, which was won a very respectable seven seconds off of the fastest time ever run, and the women’s 1500m, which was won by the world record holder in a top-20 all-time showing.

While the order of finishers wasn’t likely what you expected, it’s pretty safe to say that only three of the 12 podium athletes across these four races were true surprises—women’s 800m champ Lilian Odira, steeple bronze medalist Sembo Almayew, also of Ethiopia, and 1500m second-placer Dorcus Ewoi, of Kenya.

What that tells us is that faster races have a tendency to play out in more expected ways. Sure, there’s often a bit of shuffling near the top, but when the pace is hot from start to finish, it’s pretty logical that the best athletes will prevail. 

The upside is that the medalists in those events are more likely to represent who actually had the best seasons, top to bottom. It’s not exactly a controversial opinion to think that the World Championship should be won by who is truly the best athlete in a given discipline! And of course, it’s fun to watch people run fast—at the most lizard-brained level, isn’t that what draws so many of us to this sport in the first place?

The downside is that for those of us who like to break down the stats, unpack the storylines, and generally chop it up with post race arguments analysis, “the best person won” just isn’t all that compelling most of the time. While upsets are possible in fast races—Odira is a great example!—they’re far less common. Not to get too philosophical, but why do we watch sports in the first place, if not to relinquish some control over our lives and feel the rush of unpredictability through a medium that ultimately doesn’t come with any material personal risks?

And if that’s the kind of pompous-sounding ethos that defines your fandom, then we have great news. There were some truly unexpected, narrative-defying outcomes at this World Championships, as we have discussed above already. And those were only possible from the 1500m and up because the majority of those events were won in slow times, sometimes comically so, particularly for the men. Of course, unpredictability only goes so far when you have titans like Beatrice Chebet and Faith Kipyegon dominating the 5000m…

The obvious con to this style of racing is that we’ve become so accustomed to the sport’s stars posting ridiculous times on the circuit that we feel shortchanged when the results—which don’t tell the whole story—look more like an NCAA conference championship than the battle for the world champ title.

Blame it on the weather. Blame it on the male tendency to believe they’re all above average finishers and better off in a sit and kick affair (which, definitionally can’t be true!). Blame it on generally better high-end parity. Whatever caused it, the fellas really dogged the early laps of the 1500m, steeple, 5000m, and 10,000m, and accordingly, pretty much the whole field was still in it when the decisive move was being made late in the race.

No knock at Isaac Nader, Geordie Beamish, Cole Hocker, or Jimmy Gressier, but based solely on PBs—yeah, yeah, races aren’t run on paper!—had their finals required running near world record pace, it feels less likely they’d be the 2025 champions. But that’s the beauty of truly slow championship affairs: it’s not just that they leave a larger pool of possible champions in contention, it’s that that larger pool leads to bizarre tactical decisions and outcomes. It’s not enough to have the best kick off a doddering pace—you’ve got to be in the right position to bypass maybe a dozen bodies to unleash that kick successfully.

Shocking results are the primary reason track geeks might hope for a laughably slow first kilometer split, but the other big draw is that across rounds, you get to see athletes test out and learn from different strategies. Hocker is a prime example. After a controversial disqualification from his 1500m semifinal—the result of riding the rail then running out of room to pass—you could see the cogs spinning in his head in the 5000m qualifying then final, where he opted to lead a bulk of the race outright and make his passes on the outside, respectively. There’s simply less an athlete can learn from an all-out effort, record-setting race, aside from “you’d better be as fit as possible and feel as good as you’ve ever been or you’re toast.”

Perhaps the takeaway is that a championship full of one kind of race is boring. Having a sprinkling of both – and no guarantee that any one event will play out one way or another – is the best of both worlds.

More News From The Track And Field World 📰

– The first World Marathon Major of the fall was last weekend, but it didn’t feel like fall in Berlin with race temperatures in the mid-70s Fahrenheit. Nevertheless, Sabastian Sawe fearlessly set out at world record pace, hitting halfway in 60:16, before hanging onto the win with a 2:02:16. Sawe is now 3 for 3 in career marathons, all of which he’s run under 2:03. Rosemary Wanjiru won the women’s race in 2:21:05 by a mere three-second margin over Dera Dida, the second WMM victory of her career after winning Tokyo in 2023.

– The annus horribilis for [now-former] Fred Kerley fans continues: the two-time Olympic medalist, currently serving a provisional suspension by the Athletics Integrity Unit for whereabouts failures, was announced as the Enhanced Games’s first track and field signee. Yuck.

– Don’t throw him in the wheelbarrow, ‘cause he’s not dead yet! 39-year-old Galen Rupp took third at the Philly Distance Run in 62:42, in a race won by Athanas Kioko in 61:01. Brooks Beast Allie Buchalski won the women’s race in 69:58. The top two nonbinary finishers also broke 70 minutes in a relatively deep elite field that the event has prioritized more in recent years.

– Mooooooo-ve! Anthony Rotich (28:27) and Ednah Kurgat (32:11) won the Cow Harbor 10k in Long Island on Saturday.

– Great news, there’s no work next Monday… if you live in Botswana, that is. Their president declared a national holiday in celebration of the nation’s historic 4x400m victory. No word yet on whether Lynna Irby-Jackson’s sub-49 split on the U.S. women’s 4x400m will trigger businesses across the country to close, but we think it should.

– The early part of the NCAA cross country season continues to chug along, with the Cal Baptist harriers sweeping the titles at the Roy Griak Invitational, plus a smattering of small meets like Virginia Tech’s Hokie Invitational.

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