No Easy Answers This Week ⏱️
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Compiled by David Melly, Paul Snyder, & Kyle Merber
Who Is Carter Cutting? And Other Questions Raised By A Weird NCAAs 🤨
Last week’s NCAA Indoor Championship wrapped up in familiar fashion. The fastest 4x400m teams in the country delivered on their top billing, with the South Carolina men and Arkansas women getting the job done despite the targets on their back. For Arkansas, it was their fourth title in the last five years; it’s almost become de rigueur to add ten points to the Razorbacks’ team score before the gun goes off.
Beyond that, however, it was a pretty unusual meet. Many of the most common narratives heading into the weekend took unexpected twists and turns, from upsets to disqualifications to even the highest of expectations getting exceeded.
Sure, there were a good number of favorites getting the job done—Ja’Kobe Tharp and Kayinsola Ajayi brought home two sprint titles for Auburn, and Habtom Samuel completed his set of three NCAA titles with his first indoor victory. Wilma Nielsen picked up two big, but not entirely unexpected, wins in the mile and DMR for the Oregon Ducks, who also swept the multi events. Liisa-Maria Lusti’s pentathlon performance was a bit unexpected, and critical for Oregon’s efforts to fight off the Illinois field event juggernaut, but Payton Bair’s third straight multi title came as a surprise to no one… except, perhaps the Oregonian newspaper, who seems to only know the three-time NCAA champ as a “football player’s brother.”
When the last hip numbers were crumpled up and swept off the track, it almost seemed like there were more lingering questions than answers. In some ways, that’s a bit unsatisfying, but the glass-half-full view is that spending the next few months of the outdoor season grasping for clarity makes the process of fanning all the more fun.
Who the heck is Carter Cutting?
(Editor’s note: out of respect to our BYU friends, we’re sticking with “heck” as the four-letter word of choice.)
The three biggest favorites in the men’s mile largely delivered on their pre-race expectations: Gary Martin of UVA and George Couttie of Virginia Tech stayed near the front the whole race, and Michigan’s Trent McFarland had the biggest kick, closing in 26.35 for the last 200m. They all finished in the top four… but they all finished behind BYU junior Carter Cutting, the tenth-fastest miler in the NCAA this season. Cutting was the Big 12 champ, but hadn’t finished as the top collegian in any of his other races this season. He’d never run an individual event at NCAAs before, and his mile PB heading into the year was only 3:57.25. That’s not to take anything away from Cutting’s achievements—he’s now a 3:52 guy and the NCAA champion—but it’s safe to say no one outside of Provo saw his breakout performance coming.
Then there’s how the race itself played out. It wasn’t a total crawl, the kind that leads to a chaotic frenzy of unpredictable kicks. And it wasn’t a blistering pace that Cutting managed to outlast. It was somewhere in between, with the field hitting halfway in 2:03 before ratcheting down. Cutting managed to get to the front with 400m to go and masterfully held the inside lane, closing in a respectable but not mind-boggling 55.34 to fend off Martin et al.
McFarland was coming like a freight train in the last lap, but gave himself way too much work to do. Either Cutting found himself in the right place at the right time, or he’s the latest in the Matt Centrowitz lineage of talented runners who punch above their weight with excellent tactics. We’re used to seeing Andy Powell’s stable of middle-distance runners claim that particular mantle, but this time a BYU guy beat both Washington runners in the final at their own game.
What is it about 6.45?
A whopping 15 collegiate sprinters in history have run under 6.50 in the 60-meter dash. But the collegiate record remains stubbornly stopped at 6.45. On Saturday, Kayinsola Ajayi clocked the fifth 6.45 in NCAA history. Not only that, but it’s the second time this year Ajayi has run 6.45.
This particular statistical oddity may never get answered, but barring a rash of pro-contract-signings, it may not last another year. Ajayi and training partner Israel Okon, who finished fifth in the final, are juniors. Arkansas’s Jelani Watkins, a sophomore, ran 6.46 in the prelims and 6.48 in the final. And Malachi Snow of Texas Tech, who finished fourth in the final, ran 6.46 to win Big 12s earlier this season.
What happened to a “wide open team race”?
What looked initially like a trophy up for grabs on the men’s side turned into a bit of a dual meet, as Arkansas racked up 73.5 points on its home track to blow the field away. The competition would’ve looked a lot narrower had the Razorback duo of Tyrice Taylor and Rivaldo Marshall not made a mockery of the 800m final, going 1-2 and looking like they were finishing out a medium-easy workout. Arkansas may historically be known as more of a sprint school, but they may very well have won the meet on the backs of their distance runners, as the 800m, plus a runner-up finish in the DMR and Ernest Cheruiyot’s 11 points in the 3000m/5000m, totaled 37 points, just about the margin of victory over runner-up Oregon.
The women’s team pursuit was supposed to be a battle of track vs. field, as the Illinois throwers, jumpers, and multi-eventers set their sights on winning a national title without scoring any points on the oval. But ultimately, balance won the day: Georgia’s winning total of 53 points came from seven different events, compared with second-place Oregon (44 points off four event wins) and third-place Illinois (42 points in four events). The Bulldogs were the only team in the entire women’s competition to score in multiple track and multiple field events. In a star-heavy era of track and field, depth and breadth still wins titles.
Why was Habtom Samuel the one DQed?
One of the most controversial events of the whole meet was the men’s 3000m, where Habtom Samuel initially crossed the finish line first but ended up on the wrong side of a series of protests and got DQed. Colin Sahlman, NAU’s hero of the DMR the night before, is now officially a two-time NCAA champion. Rules are rules, and fair is fair, but if you watch the contact on the final lap, it’s not exactly clear that Samuel was the one at fault. With 120m to go, Villanova’s Marco Langon initiates contact with Samuel, and appears to cut in on the New Mexico runner as they both approached the final turn. This jockeying in turn led Samuel to run into the back of Sahlman, who stumbles a little but is otherwise mostly unaffected.
One could argue that the Samuel-Sahlman contact made the difference in the victory, as initially Samuel was given the win 0.01 seconds ahead of Sahlman, and that’s why Samuel got bounced. But the full chain of events looked more like Samuel was forced into Sahlman in an attempt to defend his space against Langon, but Langon remains in the results as the third-placer (Oregon’s Simeon Birnbaum snuck up to second on the inside in the final strides). These are tough calls for officials to sort out, but it does seem like in the interest of fairness, either both Samuel and Langon should’ve been DQed, or neither—yet only one got the axe.
Was it always going to be so easy for Jane?
Heading into the weekend, everyone was hyped up for Jane Hedengren vs. Doris Lemngole round 3 (and 4). The BYU freshman and the Alabama junior had met up twice before, at NCAA cross country and in the Millrose Games 3000m, and both times Lemngole’s closing speed proved too much to overcome. Smartly, Hedengren didn’t test her luck a third time, instead opting to tighten the screws from the front each lap, beginning with a mile to go. It was a masterclass in winning from the front, as Hedengren methodically ratcheted the pace down from 35-second laps to 31.81 with two laps remaining. By the time the bell rang, Lemngole was both gapped and cooked.
The next day, Lemngole was an unfortunate DNS in the 3000m—suggesting that, perhaps, health was a contributing factor to her showing the day prior—leading Hedengren to cakewalk her way to the first distance double by a true freshman in collegiate history. Soak it in now, because it feels highly unlikely that Hedengren is going to stick around the NCAA for ten more seasons.
So, uh… how do we feel about the women’s sprints?
The other big NCAA controversy after DQgate didn’t even hit until two days after NCAAs ended. On Saturday, Georgia’s redshirt freshman Adaejah Hodge made her biggest splash yet as a collegiate athlete, winning the 200m in 22.22 and finishing second in the 60m in 7.15. Hodge is a more familiar face than most NCAA newcomers, because track fans have seen her dominate big stages for years, first as a high school phenom for Montverde Academy, then at Worlds in 2023, then as a World junior champion and Olympian in 2024. Now that she’s beaten more experienced 200m runners like JaMeesia Ford at both SECs and NCAAs, it seemed like we were witnessing the coronation of another great sprint talent.
Except… the celebratory vibes, both for Hodge’s individual performance and Georgia’s team title, were dampened a bit on Monday when the AIU announced that Hodge had previously tested positive for a prohibited substance in 2024 and quietly served a ban that ended in January 2026. On the heels of a similar situation with Hodge’s MVA teammate Issam Assinga, who was issued a four-year ban around the same time as Hodge’s initial violation, some rightfully critical eyes have been cast on the coaching and training setup for the high school sprint powerhouse.
Hodge served her time, and the fact that she cooperated extensively with anti-doping authorities and was only 17 years old at the time of the violation provides some more nuance and context to what otherwise might be a more cut-and-dry villain narrative.
On one hand, it’s easy to combine the timing of the announcement with a hard-core stance on clean sport and cook up any number of rage-fueled conspiracy theories. On the other, you could see this as a situation where a high schooler was led down the wrong path by a bad coaching setup and is trying in good faith to turn the page. It’s entirely up to you.
All in all, the best word to describe this weekend’s NCAA festivities is simply… strange. In the spirit of March Madness, it’s always more fun when the outcomes don’t match the seed lines, and by that metric, NCAAs was quite the success. And whether you’re pulling for Lemngole, Samuel, Martin, or the Fighting Illini, there’s plenty of comeback stories just around the corner as the calendar flips to spring and a wild outdoor season to come.
Three Cheers For The New Marathon World Record*! 📣📣📣
People should be celebrating in the streets, newsies screaming “EXTRA, EXTRA, READ ALL ABOUT IT” while brandishing extremely specific papers emblazoned with THE WORLD RECORD HAS FALLEN headlines!
Instead, the report of Fotyen Tesfay’s incredible run at the Barcelona Marathon has been overshadowed by a radioactive performance that was never formally removed from the books, and as a sport, we’re forced to reckon with this new, stellar performance from a sort of purgatory. Among other things, this is what doping takes from us: moments of jubilation and inspiration.
Even if World Athletics’s race report fails to mention the context surrounding Ruth Chepngetich’s mark of 2:09:56 from October 2024, here is a very brief refresher: six months later she was caught taking hydrochlorothiazide.
Because of that, we can choose to not let “them” win by refusing to pretend that dirty records count and lean into some good old fashioned revisionist history. So join us in shouting it from the rooftops: 2:10:51 is the fastest marathon in history and the world record is back with Ethiopia.
At the same time, let’s acknowledge the reality. Plenty of critics will react to Tesfay’s performance with their eyes rolling to the back of their head. These skeptics will likely—perhaps even rightly—feel justified in any accusations because they have been burned before.
Some will talk about how this performance is too good to be true, how it came out of nowhere. Few of us went to sleep the night before Barcelona on record watch, except perhaps for Tesfay, who came through the half in 1:05:05.
It’s worth noting that while Tesfay’s marathon debut pops off the page, it’s hardly the first time she’s done something spectacular, and she’s no stranger to the magic of Spanish asphalt. Her 1:03:21 half marathon at Valencia in 2024 is the third fastest time ever. The 2:10:51 was hardly a performance from a rookie that has come out of nowhere. Since 2016, the Ethiopian has consistently competed at World Athletics global championships, Diamond Leagues, the Olympics, and other events hosted by NYRR and the BAA. There has been no hiding.
Tesfay finished eighth in the 10,000m at Worlds last year and seventh in Tokyo the year before. The list of women who beat her in both those races has three names on it: Beatrice Chebet, Nadia Battocletti, and Gudaf Tsegay. She’s one of only two women to break 64 minutes in the half on multiple occasions; the other is Agnes Ngetich, the 10km world record holder. Based on the company she keeps, it’s not crazy to suggest she’s one of the best pure distance runners in the world who simply hadn’t gotten around to a full marathon before Sunday.
If an Ethiopian breaking records in her marathon debut sounds familiar, it’s because her teammate Tigst Assefa did exactly that at the Berlin Marathon in 2023 when she ran 2:11:53. The resume of their coach, Gemedu Dedefo, continues to grow and the list of athletes under his tutelage includes Chicago winner Hawi Feysa, Boston winner Sisay Lemma, World Champion Amane Beriso, and Olympic champion Tamirat Tola. And as far as internationally competitive professional training groups go, this one doesn’t have a complicated history with the AIU.
So yes, 2:10:51 is fast. And it’s admittedly eyebrow-raising. But be mad at the proven cheaters, not the athletes who didn’t let off the gas in order to run a time that makes us more comfortable.
In A Way, The Seth Clevenger Situation Represents The Best Of Track And Field 🤔
A few weeks ago, dedicated TLC readers will remember that we took a hard look at the issue of finish-line celebrations and unsportsmanlike conduct after Tshepiso Masalela got DQed from an indoor race for clowning around in the 1500m. In reflecting on the interplay between officials, the rulebook, and the fans, we concluded that a “let ‘em play, and let the crowd decide” approach was the best path forward:
Ultimately, the arbiters of poor taste shouldn’t be the officials; it should be the fans… Professional track and field is ultimately an entertainment product, and a key part of captivating storylines are for heroes to face villains, for fans to feel passionately about the people they’re watching on screen.
Those words feel prescient now, but it’s a bit of a surprise that the stage upon which the latest villain arc played out was in… *checks notes*... Birmingham, Alabama, where the NCAA DIII Indoor Championships took place last weekend.
Dedicated track fans have been closely tracking the Seth Clevenger Saga months before it came to a head in Alabama, most notably after Jonathan Gault’s detailed reporting on the circumstances surrounding the New Jersey native’s departure from DI Iowa State and transfer to DIII Rowan University last fall.
In case you missed it, the TL;DR is that there were multiple serious allegations that Clevenger had knowingly ordered and taken banned substances, including synthetic EPO, which sources say led to his and others’ suspension from the Cyclones cross country team. But because Clevenger never tested positive within the NCAA’s spotty anti-doping system and universities are free to implement their own individual disciplinary procedures, there’s nothing that prevented Clevenger from competing—and winning two DIII titles in the 5000m and 3000m—at Rowan this season.
Much like the Adaejah Hodge situation, there’s a mountain of evidence that tells a compelling story, but ultimately it’s up to you to decide how you feel about it. Clevenger, through an attorney, insists he’s innocent of any wrongdoing, and you’re welcome to believe him—or not. It certainly seems like his competitors have strong feelings to the latter effect, given that at both podium ceremonies, the second- through eighth-place finishers departed the podium as soon as Clevenger’s name was announced and took a separate photo without him.
Now, to remove any semblance of a journalism costume… that’s totally rad. Track and field has a long and storied history of podium protests, from the big one on down through the decades. It’s an elegant and mature way to handle controversy and make your voice heard.
Let the race play out, as fairly and straightforwardly as the rulebook allows. Keep things civil at the finish line—sportsmanship isn’t totally dead; you don’t have to shake the hand of a rival you feel has done you wrong, but you shouldn’t punch them in the face either. However, if you don’t want to stand next to someone you don’t respect or wish to be associated with, for whatever reason you might have, it’s a free country! Get your trophy and get the hell out of there.
The DIII podium theatrics had all the hallmarks of a great sports moment. It was respectful and solemn but unambiguous. It didn’t put the meet officials or volunteers in a tough position, and it still gave everyone a moment to celebrate in a manner of their own choosing. Even the crotchetiest of old-timers must admit that the protest was quietly dignified and not an immature tantrum. Kudos to whoever came up with the idea.
The visual of Clevenger standing alone atop the podium, defiant in victory, could be viewed multiple ways, depending on your perspective. For Clevenger and his supporters, it symbolized the satisfying end to a long journey where it felt like the whole world was against you, and all you could rely on were your own two legs.
Or it could be interpreted a bit like the finale of VEEP (*spoiler alert* for a show that ended seven years ago), where Selina Meyer has finally achieved her life’s ambition, but she got to the Oval Office by selling out everyone around her along the way. The series ends with a quiet moment, where Meyer realizes she’s completely and utterly alone. The unspoken, final question hangs in the air: was it worth it?
Nothing about what precipitated the podium walk-off moment is exactly praise-worthy, but the way it was handled represents something kinda inspiring. The clock may be amoral, but the people subject to its impartial ticking aren’t. And in some ways, that’s the best thing about track and field: races evoke strong emotions in the athletes and fans alike, and our ability to collectively process and contextualize the mundane activity of running in circles is what makes the sport endlessly fascinating.
More News From The Track And Field World 📰
– Swedish recording artist Mondo Duplantis has bettered his own pole vault world record again, clearing a 6.31m bar at the Mondo Classic.
– On a cold, blustery day, Adriaan Wildschutt (59:30) and Hellen Obiri (1:06:33—the new event record) won the NYC Half. Behind Wildschutt, Zouhair Talbi placed second (and was the top American), and Gulveer Singh third in a new Indian all-conditions best. The women’s race saw a battle for second with Sharon Lokedi prevailing over Megan Keith by just three seconds. Grant Fisher’s hotly anticipated debut at the distance went… fine. He stayed with the leaders for 10 miles before fading to 14th overall in 1:00:53.
– Unfortunately, Elle St. Pierre will not compete at World Indoors, due to a “personal family matter.” St. Pierre’s New Balance Boston teammate Margot Appleton will line up in her place in Poland.
– At New Balance Nationals, headliner Quincy Wilson delivered the goods, winning his fourth NBN 400m title, but it took a dive at the finish and a high school record time of 45.37, 0.01 seconds ahead of Jayden Deleon. Wilson also anchored his Bullis HS 4 x 400m to the national title. Katy Zang won the two mile in 9:37.15, breaking Mary Cain’s 13-year-old high school record, then came back to win the mile in 4:35.02. And Noah Bontrager became the first athlete to break four in the mile at this meet, and just the tenth U.S. high school boy to ever dip under the barrier indoors, going 3:59.48.
– In a performance that evokes somewhat uncomfortable historical vibes, the British contingent dominated the World 50K champs in New Delhi, India, sweeping the top six spots in the men’s race and taking the top two in the women’s. The strength of the competition may have been watered down a bit by the race, initially slated for December, getting rescheduled due to poor air quality.
– Just five weeks after undergoing surgery on the sheath surrounding his Achilles tendon, Jakob Ingebrigtsen is back running on land. We are happy to see this, despite the persistent mistaken perception that some of our readers have that we are anti-Ingebrigtsen.
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