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Compiled by David Melly & Paul Snyder
The Top Five On-Track Moments That Defined 2025 ⏳
This track and field season sure was a memorable one. Something about not having the whole season revolve around those five Olympic rings makes for an entertaining year, one where excitement isn’t quite as concentrated in August and athletes are more willing to step outside their comfort zone.
There weren’t an extraordinary number of world records set this year. Of the official outdoor championship events, only four marks went down, and all four were set by existing world record holders. Instead, the most memorable moments of 2025 weren’t about historic times; they were the product of rivalries, of experimentation, of upended expectations. When we look back on the Year That Was in track and field, here are a few memorable moments on the oval that stood out.
Push came to shove.
Given that all professional sports are entertainment products—track and field being no exception—let’s kick things off with something that took place on the track but that came after the race was over: that whole Noah Lyles/Kenny Bednarek thing. As a refresher, Lyles broke the tape in the men’s 200m at the U.S. Championships in 19.63, a half stride ahead of Bednarek in 19.67, stared him down, and maybe cut him off as they decelerated. Bednarek gave Lyles a shove because (maybe?) his path had been interrupted or (maybe?) as retribution for the aforementioned stare down.
Whatever the reason, Lyles then turned and stared down Bednarek a second time, only now, his arms were outstretched in a manner universally understood to mean “come at me bro.” Bednarek did not come at him, bro. But as NBC Sports’s YouTube video of the incident describes it, things were certainly TESTY. At least publicly, nothing much else came from the incident. Cryptic statements were given during interviews. Disrespect implied or outright alluded to. Rumors circulated that the origin of the beef stemmed from an anonymous track gossip Twitter page. By the time Worlds rolled around, all parties were claiming the hatchet was buried
But for one, brief, thrilling moment, the biggest headline in the sport was that two of the biggest names were beefing. Track and field has a reputation for its athletes being friendly and respectful, focused on camaraderie and individual excellence. That’s part of the draw for some fans. But for plenty of others, a little bit of bad blood raises the stakes and makes things far more interesting. We want to see people run fast—and there’s an element of excitement when you know it’s not just about medals… it’s personal.
The new guard faced off.
After last track season, it seemed clear that the athlete to beat in the women’s sprints was Olympic 100m champ Julien Alfred. At 23 years old, the St. Lucian was coming off a breakout season at the start of her physical prime, and for the first few months of the season, it seemed like she would continue to steamroll any and all competition in her way.
Enter Melissa Jefferson-Wooden. The Olympic bronze medalist had a huge year of her own in 2024, but she was largely overshadowed by the two fellow former NCAA champs ahead of her on the Paris podium, Alfred and MJW’s training partner Sha’Carri Richardson. She came out firing this spring, however, clocking a 100m/200m sweep at two of the three Grand Slam events. Her performance in Philadelphia was particularly notable because she not only ran a world-leading 10.73 in the 100m, she defeated Olympic champ Gabby Thomas in the 200m, generally considered her weaker event. At the same time, Alfred was doing the rounds on the European circuit, clocking a 10.7 of her own in cool weather in Sweden. Until the two met for the first time this season, it still felt like Alfred had the edge as she handily dispatched international Diamond League fields with what looked like 70% effort.
But at the Prefontaine classic on July 5, everything changed: Alfred and Jefferson-Wooden met head-to-head for the first time of the year, and the American got the better of her rival in a tight battle, 10.75 to 10.77. Before that meeting, Alfred was 4-0 against MJW head-to-head, and two months later, MJW proved Pre was no fluke with a decisive 10.61 victory in Tokyo. Now, we head into 2026 with the narrative flip-flopped: Both are huge stars running the fastest they’ve ever run, but now it’s Alfred chasing Jefferson-Wooden’s shadow and looking to get back on top.
Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone chased history—in a totally new event.
We’re truly lucky Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone got tired of breaking her own records in the hurdles, and even luckier she stuck with the flat 400m after things didn’t quite go her way in 2023.
It’s easy to remember the main takeaway from this year: SML ran 47.78, the second-fastest time in history and the fastest in 40 years. But for a good two-thirds of the season, it felt like once again Sydney’s chase of the American record would continue to be her white whale: In four races leading up to Worlds, she never ran faster than 48.90 after running 48.74 two seasons prior. But when the Tokyo semifinals rolled around, Sanya Richards-Ross was finally bumped off the top spot in the record books as Sydney cooked a ridiculous 48.29 before she even got to the final.
The true magic of Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone is that you know exactly what she’s going to do under the bright lights, and yet the results are still stunning. Yeah, she’s fast, we get it. A generational talent, a record-breaker. And yet, in that moment on the homestretch when she stopped the clock in 47 seconds for the first time in four decades, she still found a way to take our breaths away. Not since Usain Bolt has an athlete managed to bring a wow-factor to a predictable outcome over and over again, and like Bolt, Sydney has now done it in two different events.
Men’s distance results were Jimmy’d around.
The first men’s running final of the 2025 World Championships was the men’s 10,000m, and coming off of the 2024 Olympics—which saw a historically fast running of the event—expectations were high. The winner from Paris, Joshua Cheptegei was out focusing on the roads, so the gold medal looked up for grabs. Paris’s silver and bronze medalists, Berihu Aregawi and Grant Fisher, were back and presumptive favorites to do something similar in Tokyo. But beyond those two, plenty of other names popped off the entry list: Yomif Kejelcha, Mo Ahmed, Andreas Almgren, Thierry Ndikumwenayo, and plenty of others. One of those “and plenty of others” was the feisty Frenchman Jimmy Gressier, a perennial also-ran more known for his celebratory antics than any particular race result. And yet, off of a slow pace that kept the entire field in contention through the final lap, it was Gressier whose final gear was the fastest.
This race didn’t feel like the coronation of a new global leader—though Gressier may very well medal again on the world stage. It felt like the track and field Joker showing up to introduce a little anarchy. From the moment Gressier crossed the finish line until the conclusion of the global championships, unexpected outcomes prevailed across basically every men’s race above 800m. The Olympic 1500m champ gets DQ’d from that event but comes back to win the 5000m? Sure. The 1500m is won by a steady-performing but unheralded Portuguese athlete? Okay! The steeple goes to a hard-closing Kiwi who almost didn’t make the final after nearly having his face spiked off mid-tumble? Of course! A Tanzanian marathoner secures his nation’s first ever international athletics gold medal in a photo finish? Naturally. While results like this make pre-writing anything impossible, they’re undeniably more fun!
Mondo was Mondo.
As much as we love an unexpected slate of outcomes, sport does rely on stars to generate buzz. And right now, there is no brighter, nor more consistent star in our sport—or really, any sport—than Mondo Duplantis. Duplantis won Worlds (duh) and set a new world record there, to boot. He hasn’t lost a competition of any sort—and we are counting his 1-on-1 100m showdown with Karsten Warholm—since July of 2023. It’s hard to boil down Mondo’s season to any one moment, partially because he broke the world record four separate times. But the first and the last were particularly memorable. In his second competition of the year, he leapt 6.27m indoors in Clermont, France, on February 28, making it clear that he hadn’t slowed his roll any bit post-2024. And at Worlds, he officially took the event into a new stratosphere, clearing 6.30m. He’s now both the only man in history to clear 6.20m and 6.30m, and if that doesn’t show just how extraordinary an athlete Mondo is, what does?
Decades from now, these will be the performances that stick in our minds and get retold to the next generation. But some of the best moments of the year happened before the gun went off and after the dust had settled. Next week, we’ll look beyond the on-paper results and at the moments in 2025 where off-the-track antics and news got lips a-flapping and fans a-fighting.
What’s Next For Athing? 🤨
Last week, a major story disrupted what’s traditionally to be a slow period in track and field news: American record holder Athing Mu-Nikolayev has parted ways with coach Bobby Kersee after three years working together.
Normally, a coaching switch for an athlete who didn’t make it out of this year’s 800m semifinal at USAs would barely warrant a bullet point in the highlights zone of this newsletter, let alone its own section. But Athing Mu-Nikolayev is no also-ran, even if her 2025 season didn’t go as she’d hoped. In case your memory got hazy over the last few seasons, remember that:
– In 2019, Mu-Nikolayev broke the American indoor record over 600m at age 16. In that race, she won her first U.S. senior title and beat Raevyn Rogers, who would go on to win World silver in Doha later that same year, while Mu-Nikolayev was still in high school.
– In her sole collegiate campaign, Mu-Nikolayev set the indoor and outdoor NCAA 800m records, plus the outdoor 400m record (since broken), and won three NCAA titles. Despite all the trackflation that’s followed, she remains the sole woman to run under 1:59 indoors and 1:58 outdoors in college.
– Just after turning 19, she proceeded to win USAs outdoors and the Olympic title in 1:55.21, an American record, becoming the youngest American woman to win gold on the track since 1964.
– The next year, she won the World title at Hayward Field in Eugene, the first American World champion in the 800m.
– Since switching to Kersee in 2023, the results haven’t been as consistent and she has battled injuries, but she did lower her own American record to 1:54.97 at the 2023 Prefontaine Classic.
– Mu-Nikolayev currently holds the No. 1, 2, 3, 6, and 7 marks on the American all-time list for 800m.
– She is only 23 years old. By the time the 2036 Olympics roll around, she will be 34.
Okay, you probably knew most of that. But when laid out all at once, it helps demonstrate why the career and coaching status of one athlete matters so much. On the current track and field scene, the list of athletes who have accomplished so much so young is pretty much three names: Mu-Nikolayev, Mondo Duplantis, and Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone. You could argue that Femke Bol and Keely Hodgkinson deserve inclusion on that list, but their best stuff has come in their 20s, not as teenagers, so their prodigy status deserves at least a small asterisk. With the LA28 Olympic cycle firmly underway, the stakes for the next phase of Mu-Nikolayev’s career—not just for her personally, but for all of Team USA and the sport of track and field broadly—are about as high as it gets.
Without dwelling on it too much, it’s safe to say that the Bobby Kersee experiment was largely unsuccessful. It was certainly an interesting notion: see if one of the greatest sprints/jumps coaches of all time could steer a speed-oriented middle-distance runner toward world domination, but for whatever reason—poor coaching fit, poor injury timing, or just poor luck—it didn’t translate. But despite having done a bit of it to open this section, we’re not here to navel-gaze; it’s time to envision a bright future ahead.
Where should Athing Mu-Nikolayev look next for guidance? Surely, her options are pretty limitless (within the bounds of what is surely an iron-clad Nike contract), but in some sense, there really isn’t a perfect fit. Coaches capable of consistently producing world-class 800m results aren’t exactly a dime a dozen, and those with experience guiding a truly generational talent to long-term success are even fewer. Throw in a presumed desire to remain in a warm part of the U.S. and the aforementioned contractual obligations, and you’ve got a lot of competing interests with no obvious solution. Here are a few of the best ones:
Retire: We pray to the track gods this isn’t a realistic option, but we fear it’s not as unlikely as it might be for a 23-year-old with many fast years ahead. Athing has been candid about the mental challenges of being so good, so young, combined with the challenge of bouncing back from the devastation of her 2024 fall at the U.S. Olympic Trials. Given that she has plenty of time to right the ship and rediscover her love of competing, this particular path is hopefully a long, long ways away.
Joanna Hayes: The UCLA head coach is known for her accolades as a hurdler, but Hayes’s stable of professional athletes includes Mu-Nikolayev’s co-medalist from Tokyo, Raevyn Rogers, as well as fellow former teen phenom Sammy Watson. In many ways, this is the safe choice—staying based in Los Angeles, sticking with a coach with a very similar resume to Kersee, and training with other speed-focused 800m runners.
Diljeet Taylor: The charismatic force behind the ladies of BYU and the Provo chapter of Swoosh TC may have more of a reputation as a long-distance coach, guiding the likes of Jane Hedengren, Courtney Wayment, and national-championship-winning cross country teams, but she also coaches the woman right behind Mu-Nikolayev on the NCAA all-time list, Meghan Hunter. Living at altitude and training with a more distance-oriented approach would certainly be a change for Mu-Nikolayev, but if anyone has shown the capacity to thrive on the mental side of coaching as well as the Xs and Os, it’s Taylor (who is, herself, a former elite middle-distance athlete).
Another college-based group: If what Mu-Nikolayev wants to do is stay close to a university-based program, there are a few options, most notably returning to her former Texas A&M coach Milton Mallard (now at Arizona State), Stanford coach JJ Clark, or the growing group of pros training under the Johnsons at Arkansas. In an ideal world, there would be more separation between the collegiate and professional ranks of track and field, but we’re not going to hold Athing to task to our broader gripes about the sport.
Derek Thompson: It’s been a little while since the Philadelphia-based 800m guru was consistently churning U.S. titles out of his star pupil Ajee’ Wilson, but others, including Raevyn Rogers, Nia Akins, and Charlene Lipsey, have been guided by Thompson in recent years as well. And let’s not forget that Wilson made the final at USAs last year, and in many ways is the perfect training partner-slash-mentor for an athlete like Mu-Nikolayev. Wilson parlayed a standout high school career into a decade of international success, and though she never quite reached the heights that Mu-Nikolayev did, she and Thompson sure know a thing or two about what it’s like to be in those shoes.
Hear us out… M11 track club: What would the craziest possible plot twist for 2026? If Mu-Nikolayev crossed the pond to train alongside her chief rival, 2024 Olympic champion Keely Hodgkinson. But it’s not as crazy as it sounds: Hodgkinson already welcomed another friendly rival, Georgia Hunter Bell, into her training group, and just last month, the group, led by Trevor Painter and 2009 World 800m medalist Jenny Meadows, added American Elise Cranny. Location aside, it may very well be the best fit in terms of training partners.
Wherever Mu-Nikolayev does land, they’ll be lucky to have her. And whatever path she takes will, for better or worse, be dissected and scrutinized by fans and media alike. While it may not be the fairest or truest lens, the success of her next coach will ultimately depend on the results the two produce together. For an athlete of Mu-Nikolayev’s caliber, true long-term success probably depends on accomplishing one of two things: A second Olympic gold, something only one other woman in history has achieved, or the world record, which has stood for 42 years. Talk about grading on a harsh curve.
More News From The Track And Field World 📰
– Worth the jet lag: Sinclaire Johnson sure made the most of her Hawaiian vacation, winning the Kalakaua Merrie Mile in 4:21.66, a new U.S. record that also moves her into No. 2 all-time.
– BYU’s women’s DMR squad almost certainly (but in today’s results economy, who knows?) knocked out its DMR qualifier for NCAA Indoors at a quiet home meet a week ago. They ran 10:41.85—a time that when broken down into individual splits and altitude-adjusted accordingly—is allegedly worth 10:33.10 on a banked 200m track at sea level.
– In unsurprising-at-this point financial news, Grand Slam Track has officially filed for chapter 11 bankruptcy and won’t return next year unless all its debts are cleared, per Michael Johnson. Next year’s theoretical season—already in grave jeopardy—appears to be in even graver jeopardy.
– Reigning men’s 1500m World champion Isaac Nader has left his coach and training group. No word on who will guide Nader on his quest to defend his title, but he has been working out in South Africa with Tomasz Lewandowski‘s training camp, a group that features Niels Laros and Timothy Cheruiyot.
– It’s December, which means we are being given a taste here and there of exciting field announcements for the spring. First up, four big names that are slated to run the 2026 Boston Marathon: defending champ John Korir is back for seconds; 2025 runner-up Sharon Lokedi returns with her eyes on a win; and American record holders Conner Mantz and Emily Sisson will have their sights set on the podium.
– 2025 U.S. 800m champ Roisin Willis has announced she is foregoing the remainder of her NCAA eligibility at Stanford and has turned professional. What a week where this announcement isn’t the biggest off-season change-up out of this event group, huh?
– Fresh off individual wins at NXN, Natasza Dudek (16:55.5) and Jackson Spencer (15:10.7) wrapped up their cross country seasons at the Brooks XC Championships (formerly Foot Locker).
– Italy’s Nadia Battocletti (24:52) and Spain’s Thierry Ndikumwenayo (22:05) took home top honors at the European Cross Country Championships, held in Lagoa, Portugal.
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Thanks for all your hard work and I love everything you do keep it up.Bill Theriault the Mascot for the 1984 Olympics Sam the American Eagle and the head weight 65LBS
Thanks for the coverage this year!
But how did you miss putting any field mentions in the year’s top 5?
I also was hoping you would give us a preview of the upcoming World XC event- especially since it is in Florida.