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Compiled by David Melly, Paul Snyder, & Kyle Merber
Making World Indoors Worth The Trip âïžđ”đ±
Itâs understandable if after watching the final day of this yearâs World Indoor Championship in Torun, Poland, you couldnât get âGod Save the Kingâ out of your head. Team Great Britain went on quite the tear Sunday evening, winning the womenâs pole vault, 800m, and 1500m, all in the span of about half an hour. The day before, Josh Kerr finished his race with the Sleep Heard âRound the World asâlike the Redcoats marching through Lexington and Concordâhe mercilessly dispatched American Cole Hocker and gave him a taste of his own celebratory medicine.
When the championship wrapped up, athletes from Great Britain and Northern Ireland, a federation representing a country with about one-fifth the population of the United States, had just one fewer gold medal than Team USA. (Though to be fair, U.S. athletes brought home 18 medals total, more than three times as many as the next nation.)
After years of frustrations over UK Athletics not fielding complete rosters at international championships, the oft-maligned governing body seems to have figured out a radical new strategy of âsend all your best people.â Of the seven British athletes who medaled in open events at either 2025 Worlds or the 2024 Olympics, four of them made the trip to Torun, and thatâs not counting 9x medalist Dina Asher-Smith or two-time World Indoor champ Molly Caudery. Over that same two-championship stretch, 31 Americans (not counting certain throwers who couldnât compete indoors, even if they wanted to) medaled in open events. Just six of those were in Poland.
One could argue that itâs easier for multi-athletes and shot putters to prioritize World Indoors since their disciplines arenât being contested at the World Ultimate Championship on the other end of the 2026 season. So extra kudos to Cole Hocker, Yared Nuguse, and Jasmine Moore for showing up and showing out when so many of their compatriots simply didnât care to circle World Indoors on their calendar.
This isnât just a U.S. vs. U.K. thing, and itâs certainly an oversimplification. Noah Lyles, for example, put together a strong indoor campaign and simply didnât get top-two at USAs. Jake Wightman regularly struggles to string together stretches healthy running, so itâs entirely possible that skipping World Indoors wasnât his choice. There are plenty of perfectly-valid reasons why big names would be justified in skipping, ranging from pregnancy to marathon prep and everything in between. And then there are those for whom it simply⊠wasnât worth it.
A World Championship being ânot worth itâ is one of those things that weâve sadly come to expect, but it sounds crazy to anyone else who isnât a diehard track and field fan. And to be clear, the burden isnât on the athletes to make an irrational decision for the sake of the greater good. Itâs on the folks in charge of incentive structuresânamely, World Athletics, national governing bodies, meet organizers, and sponsorsâto make World Indoors âworth it.â
Take the worldâs best 400-meter runners, for example. Letsile Tebogo, Vernon Norwood, and others have been chirping back and forth about the various races Botswana and the U.S. are or arenât contesting. And yet Botswana wasnât on the start line at World Indoors when the U.S. team took gold in a championship-record 3:01.52. Theyâve decided to prioritize World Relays, which is kinda-sorta-but-not-really-this-year a global championship, two months from now because itâs hosted in Gaborone, the nationâs capital. That makes total sense for them! Theyâll have a packed crowd of adoring fans, can still win a gold medal of a sort, and are likely financially incentivized to show up by various national stakeholders.
If your primary interest is seeing top-quality racing and exciting rivalries, however, itâs a bummer. World Ultimate decided menâs and womenâs 4x400ms werenât âultimateâ enough, so barring any sort of lucrative exhibition effort, we wonât see the two best relays in the World, who relish talking trash to each other, race head-to-head for another 18 months. If weâd gotten this whole championship thing right, it couldâve happened twice in six weeks!
When we do get the stars to literally align (i.e., stand next to each other on a starting line), the results are electric. The menâs middle distances provide a perfect template. Cole Hocker, Josh Kerr, and their respective egos showed up in New York City at the 2026 Millrose Games, raced one another in a two mile that was hyped months in advance, and the American got the better of the Scot. At the finish line, he did the Steph Curry bedtime celebration (which Hocker seems to think he inventedâŠ?). Then Kerr gets the better of Hocker at Worlds in the 3000m and caps off his gold-medal run with a sleepytime moment of his own. Thatâs theater. You couldnât script it any better, short of Kerr fielding questions in the mixed zone wearing a sleeping cap and nightgown.
The womenâs 60m final saw another great clash. Julien Alfred returned to reclaim her World Indoor title after dominating the field in 2024, only to get beat by American Jacious Sears and surprise winner Zaynab Dosso of Italy. Coming out of the semifinal, the top seven qualifiers had all run between 7.00 and 7.05. But where were the Star Athletics sprinters? Or the Clayton sisters? Credit is due to the Jamaican men for making the tripâBryan Levell, Kishane Thompson, and Ackeem Blake all contested the 60m. Their presence helped validate the arrival of Jordan Anthony, who capped off a breakout indoor season that saw him beat Thompson, Lyles, and Trayvon Bromell one after another.
Thatâs perhaps the most frustrating part of World Indoors. It is worth it for some, just not all. And with the next championship slated for March 2028 in Odisha, India, things could go one of two ways. With LA28 looming and a lesser championship located halfway around the world, Odisha could be the most-skipped World Indoors in the history of Americans skipping World Indoors. OR⊠it could be a global preview of all the worldâs best runners, jumpers, and throwers, serving as the perfect opening act for a banner year of track and field.
Which way it goes is entirely up to the folks at the helm. The event has incredible potential, and with a little rejiggering of outside factors, it could be a much shinier jewel in the track and field crown.
Jess Hull Should Be Seb Coeâs Favorite Athlete đ
In total, there were 54 athletes that won individual medals on the track at the 2025 World Championships in Tokyo. Just 13 competed this past weekend in Poland at World Indoors. At first, that seems like a disappointingly low number from a participation standard⊠that is until you consider there were just six that came over from the Olympic podium to Nanjing last year.
Being that this is a non-Olympic year and Poland is in a relatively accessible time zone for most of the worldâs top athletes, there were a few less excuses than normal to not attend. Still, many athletes choose not to focus on the indoor season for one reason or another, and some didnât even acknowledge its existence.
Thatâs disappointing from a fan interest perspective, but it has financial implications as well. Host federations generally donât often fill their coffers putting on a global championship. (They actually tend to lose quite a bit of money!) Fortunately, governments are willing to take on a significant cost burden to subsidize things in hope of the economic benefit that tourism can bring to a city. In 2023, Budapest reported that their $186 million expenditure was worth $408 million in local impact, much of which was spent on Dreher lagers in the caves. The 400,000 tickets sold made about $8 million of revenue.
Like most major sports federations, World Athletics isnât terribly financially exposed to each individual championship. But its ability to make moneyâoutside of being handed a large bag by the IOC every four yearsâis dependent on media rights deals and sponsorships. The more events they can convince other countries to host, the more inventory they can potentially sell. (Enter the World Road Running Championships and World Ultimate Championships!)
Hereâs the tough part: the busier the calendar, the harder it tends to be to win over athletes. Having 13 of the biggest stars in the world compete in Poland is good, but itâd make future negotiations and pitch-decks more intriguing if Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone, Letsile Tebogo, and ShaâCarri Richardson had been there.
In addition to being a huge fan of his music, talent, and sense of humor, Seb Coe loves Mondo Duplantis because he makes his life a bit easier. He knows that at every track and field championship, Mondo Duplantis is guaranteed to be there, ready to put on a show. However, the pole vault has its limitationsânamely, that there is no cross country or road-specific pole vault championship.
There is, however, one athlete that has never missed an opportunity to contest a global championship. She deserves every medal sheâs ever earned, and in a just world, sheâd have a statue outside the Monaco headquarters. Since graduating from Oregon in 2019, Jess Hull has run at EVERY championship that she could have reasonably competed inâall 13 of them!
Letâs list them out so you can understand her dedication to the World Athletics calendar, and appreciate the vast quantity of airline points sheâs likely accrued:
2026 World Indoors â Poland
2026 World Cross Country â United States
2025 World Outdoors â Japan
2025 World Indoors â China
2024 Olympics â France
2024 World Indoors â Scotland
2023 World Road Running â Latvia
2023 World Outdoors â Hungary
2023 World Cross Country â Australia
2022 World Outdoors â United States
2022 World Indoors â Serbia
2021 Olympics â Japan
2019 World Outdoors â Qatar
Hull yeah!
If Hull could just learn how to race walk then she would likely be heading to Brasilia in two weeks. For her efforts, Hull has earned seven global medals, most recently a silver and a bronze in the 1500m and 3000m, respectively, this past weekend. To be that consistently healthy, let alone competitive enough to regularly podium, is an accomplishment in and of itself. Additionally, the Australian superstar has raced at Diamond League Meetings in 13 different cities.
After her race in Poland, Hull told reporters, âIf thereâs a race for medals anywhere in the world, I will be there.â If Seb Coe builds it, come Hull or high water, Jess will come.
World Athletics Is Going To Accidentally Recreate Eurovision đžđȘđ€
Mondo is writing and recording an original theme song for the World Ultimate Championships.
Thatâs as close as we come in track and field to a sentence that would be entirely indecipherable to a person even 10 years ago. In 2016, Mondo was better known as a track surface as opposed to a person. Anything called the âUltimate Championshipsâ would have likely been a team frisbee tournament where adults with full-time jobs competed for a plastic trophy and Dickâs Sporting Goods gift cards on a wide stretch of beach along the Jersey Shore. There would have been little reason for either of these concepts to require a theme song.
But today, when we read and ruminate on that statementâMondo is writing and recording an original theme song for the World Ultimate Championshipsâwe understand what it means.
Armand âMondoâ Duplantis is the greatest pole vaulter in history. You could make the case that heâs the greatest field event specialist, too. Itâs not even crazy to suggest he is the best athlete our sport (or any other, for that matter) has ever seen. Being Swedish, heâs got a knack for pop songwriting.
And heâs been tapped by World Athletics to create and perform an anthemic pop number to commemorate the first ever World Ultimate Championships. If that comes as a surprise to you, itâs because youâve missed Mondoâs first two singles, 2025âs âBopâ and more recently âFeelinâ Myself.â
Theyâre both well-crafted, totally palatable pop songs that wouldnât feel out of place on a tropical house Spotify playlist. Mondo very much looks the part of a European pop star, too, and when performing, carries himself with a calm charisma befitting an athlete of his stature. He does in fact appear to be feelinâ himself while he sings about feelinâ himself, grooving easily to the âPumped Up Kicksâ-indebted basslineâthatâs not easy to pull off.
The bar is low as far as track stars wading into the musical realm, but even so, Mondoâs music is better than an athleteâs vanity project has any business being. Itâs serviceable, down-the-middle, auto-tuned fun that wouldnât have stood out as exceptional or below average while flipping through the radio in 2015. Is it Temu Justin Bieber? Perhaps. But you wouldnât be appalled if it came up on shuffle. The world needs that kind of stuffâas a soundtrack for grocery shopping, for straight-to-Netflix romcom montages, and now, to hype up novel track and field event formats. Credit where credit is due.
In tasking one of its most recognizable stars with drumming up excitement for this yearâs biggest track event, World Athletics execs are masterminding the sort of ~synergy~ every MBA student can only dream of. Surely Mondoâs day rate is less than somebody making similar music, like Kygoâthe Norwegian producer whose 2025 collaboration with extremely Colorado-coded boy band OneRepublic featured Mondo in its music video. And surely the average track and field fan will be more excited by Mondo dropping a mid-career-Bieber-sounding song than Kygo or somebody Kygo-adjacent doing the same.
Vertical integration aside, is this good for the sport? Thatâs tougher to say.
Weâre doubtful this will be what it takes for track to bumrush the mainstream. Itâs equally unlikely that the World Ultimate Championship theme song is going to be Mondoâs big musical break. (He seems to enjoy making music that he enjoys listening toâthat doesnât mean itâs the genre of music that will appeal to larger audiences about a decade after its peak commercial viability.) Will track fans get a kick out of it? Sure! Will it get talked about for a few minutes on Sports Shouting? Possibly! Will any of that move the needle? Probably not.
What would, however, is this: a last-minute addition to the World Ultimate program, in the form of an athletes-only Eurovision-style song contest.
It would be structured as a sort of biathlon. Entrants would field their standard track and field event, then be forced to share an originally written pop song in front of a cheering, jeering crowd of crazed sports/pop music fans.
Mondo is already a lock as an entrant. Weâll see if Jakob Ingebrigtsen can get back into fighting shape/churn out another Norwegian-language pop banger. Noah Lyles and Sandi Morris could reunite for Team USA. Ideally there would be a handful of other athletes who hail from someplace other than Scandinavia. But the gist is that your placement in your athletic event and your placement in the song competition are averaged out, with a separate podium moment for the best hybrid athlete (sorry not sorry to Hyrox competitors â displaying range as a world class track and field athlete and hook-writer is what really makes you a hybrid star).
Look, we wonât pretend this is a super feasible or even a good idea⊠but it would be fun as hell. And thereâs certainly precedent for weird, non-sporting events to wind up enmeshed in global athletic competitions. Just ask Charles Downing Lay, who took silver for Team USA at the 1936 Olympics in town planning for his design of what would go on to become Brooklynâs Marine Park.
More News From The Track And Field World đ°
â Freaky Friday 3? One fun side-plot to Cooper Lutkenhaus winning the menâs 800m in Poland and becoming the youngest ever World Indoor champion is that he accidentally traded medals with Keely Hodgkinson, the womenâs 800m winner.
â Racing for the first time since the U.S. Half Marathon Champs fiasco, Emma Grace Hurley took the win and established a new American 8k record (24:29) at Chicagoâs Shamrock Shuffle. Hurley has been on a tear recently, which begs the question: at what point do we start referring to her by her initialsââEGHââlike so many other stars in the sport?
â In Major Bummer news, Sifan Hassan has withdrawn from next monthâs London Marathon due to an Achilles injury. Shout out to Greek mythology⊠those guys really picked the right region of the lower leg to canonize as tragic.
â In More Major Bummer news, discus world record holder Mykolas Alekna announced heâd undergone surgery to repair a torn pectoral muscle and will be out for a little while. The Oregon transferâs almost comical pursuit of the NCAA title thatâs eluded him for three years will have to wait.
â After seven years as an Asics athlete, 2024 Olympic marathoner Clayton Young has signed a new deal with Brooks. Young spoke with Chris Chavez on the CITIUS MAG podcast about his decision, representing himself in contract negotiations, his injury-abbreviated build for next monthâs Boston Marathon, and more.
â Hector Pagan won Rockland County, New Yorkâs loopfest known as Project 13.1 in a new Puerto Rican record of 1:01:55. American Anna Oeser took the womenâs race in 1:10:35.
â In the latest round of the paper-pushing thriller known as Grand Slam Track Bankruptcy Drama, founder Michael Johnson has committed to repaying the $500,000 he received from the league last summer, and the latest agreement suggests that athletes will receive around 70% of their promised compensation. Vendors, on the other hand, are expected to get back just 14-15% of what theyâre owed for the services they provided.
â Those hooligans! Thereâs new drama in Britainâs bid to host the 2029 World Championships, as West Ham United, which stakes a scheduling claim over Londonâs Olympic Stadium during the football season, is refusing to give up the desired week on the calendar.
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