The Fastest Newsletter Alive ⏱️
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Compiled by David Melly, Paul Snyder, & Kyle Merber
Stop Fighting Over Who’s The “Fastest Woman Alive” 🙅♀️
Last weekend, the most visually-interesting spectacle in pro track and field kicked off Down Under: the 148-year-old Stawell Gift race outside Melbourne, headlined by former American 100m World champs Sha’Carri Richardson and Christian Coleman.
If you enjoyed the viral clips of Shelly-Ann Fraser-Pryce taking on the parents at her son’s school, buckle up, because this is the meet for you. The top pros race a wide range of competitors through multiple rounds on a grass straightaway, with staggered starts based on speed.
Richardson may not have raced any major rivals from the U.S. or Jamaican sprint scene, but she still had her work cut out for her—she had to cover 120 meters, not 100m. Her 13.07 was the fastest women’s time in the race’s history, and she became only the third woman ever to win outright in the unique format.
But that wasn’t what Track Twitter was riled up about last weekend… at least not directly. One user who may or may not be some sort of LinkedIn-trained engagement farming LLM tweeted a video of the race with the caption “The fastest woman alive flew to rural Australia to chase down amateurs on a grass field for $27,500,” triggering a firestorm of replies and comments. For what feels like the 200th time, three little words set track and field purists, Jamaican superfans, and online trolls into a frenzy.
Fastest. Woman. Alive.
Let’s start with the obvious: by pretty much any metric, Sha’Carri Richardson is not the fastest woman alive. She’s not the current world leader, World champion, Olympic champion, or #1-ranked sprinter. She’s fifth on the list of fastest living 100m runners and, for what it’s worth, she’s not even the fastest sprinter in her own training group.
Besides, if you were so inclined to name a fastest man or woman alive, how do you even begin to decide which of those metrics to prioritize? Lifetime best, world ranking list, global gold medals… there are all valid reasons to pick a system that supports your own predetermined conclusion.
Is “fastest” a lifelong claim or does it only apply to the present moment? Usain Bolt is the greatest sprinter in history, but put him on a start line today, April 8th, 2026, and a decent number of high schoolers could take his lunch money.
Why does fastest only apply to the 100m? Perhaps because it’s the shortest event… except it’s not! Maybe the fastest woman alive is World Indoor 60m champ Zaynab Dosso. Agnes Ngetich is the fastest woman alive over 10 kilometers… unless you run those 10 kilometers on a track, in which case it’s Beatrice Chebet. Heck, given that most sprinters achieve a higher top speed in the 200m, you could even argue that the 100m is the wrong event to attach the “fastest” label to if all you care about is speed.
Ultimately, it’s a meaningless term that’s mostly used as kindling on the bonfire of the U.S.-Jamaican sprint rivalry, another opportunity for the worst iteration of stan culture to overtake news feeds and give commentators something to fight about and rack up views during a weekend when not much else was happening on the pro circuit. The endless rounds of GOAT debates are not unique to track and field, by any means, but this is a particularly annoying one because it relies entirely on a focus on semantics, not performance.
You might find yourself asking: Why give it the oxygen, then? Not because the debate over the fastest athlete alive has any merit, but because of what it represents culturally.
Let’s go back to the origin of this particular fight. A commenter with no particular track expertise attached his name and account to a viral video of Sha’Carri hawking down slower runners, throwing out a random superlative to garner engagement. “Fastest woman alive” is not a term for track analysts, superfans, or competitors; it’s a lazy shorthand to try and explain why an athlete matters to casuals.
Outside of online bickering, the most mainstream manner in which the term gets thrown around is quadrennially, right after the Olympic 100-meter final. An overexcited NBC color commentator will crow definitively to the millions who tuned in for that race, and that race only, that a new “fastest [wo]man alive” has been crowned because Noah Lyles or Julien Alfred just won the only race that matters in the eyes of that particular viewer set. Those “fans” know Bolt, they might remember FloJo, and they probably wrongly think Allyson Felix won Olympic 100m gold. But they’re not tuning into the Diamond League final; they don’t know or care about the other seven finalists the Olympic champ beat. By 2024, they’ve long forgotten the names Elaine Thompson-Herah and Marcell Jacobs.
Ultimately, that’s what the “fastest person alive” debate represents: a dumbing-down of a compelling, crowded sport into the simplest possible terms, the persistent TikTokification of every possible athletic narrative into something that can be understood for ten seconds of focus between scrolls.
It’s a useless metric for diehard fans, and there’s no evidence it’s succeeding in attracting new eyeballs. Track and field is a pretty simple sport already, in the grand scheme of things. (Try explaining the rules of American football to a European sometime! And yet, the NFL is doing just fine, monetarily.) So why are we trying to make it simpler, when instead we should be enriching the narrative around those ten seconds of action?
Look at all the ways other “niche” sports have broken into the broader public consciousness. Women’s hockey is way more fascinating when you realize that two of the Olympians playing for gold may be mid-breakup. Tadej Pogacar winning another bike race is boring until you see the crazy crash that he overcame mid-race. The best sports moment of the past weekend came from UConn women’s coach Geno Auriemma refusing to shake Dawn Staley’s hand at the NCAA Final Four. The actual championship game was a snooze by comparison!
The last time Sha’Carri Richardson ignited this particular debate was in 2024, when online promotion of her Vogue magazine profile called her “the fastest woman in the world,” enraging a lot of folks on a certain Caribbean island. But that all happened because… Sha’Carri was in Vogue. She didn’t get there based on her spot in the all-time top-ten list, and there are plenty of other World champions who don’t end up on the covers of magazines. Sha’Carri garnered a splashy photoshoot and a 2,500-word feature in a mainstream publication because she’s interesting. That’s much more marketable than a personal best or gold medal ever will be. So let’s focus a little less on stats, and a little more on stories if we want to get people to care about sprinting greatness for more than ten seconds at a time.
The Marathon Goes Solo 🥇
Like a broken clock, occasionally this newsletter gets something right. Three years ago, following the success of the inaugural World Road Running Championships, TLC made a bold suggestion:
“...Move the marathon from the World Athletics Championships to the World Road Running Championships… then use the funding from the 30,000+ person event to pay elite athletes better than any other race so that it actually crowns the true world champion.”
Yesterday World Athletics announced the introduction of the World Marathon Championships as a standalone event, separate from the World Athletics Championships. The 2027 and 2029 iterations of the race will continue as usual with the marathon as part of the track & field circus, but outside the main tent. Then, in 2030, the ‘thon will do its best David S. Pumpkins impression and declare, “I’m my own thing!”
The initial head scratcher for most fans—including us—was the decision to host this separately from the World Road Running Championships. The marathon is, famously, a road race. But that doesn’t factor in the elephant-sized cash register in the room. If there is economic viability to expand the World Athletics road racing circuit from one marquee event to two, then why not do it?
During the 2023 World Road Running Championships, there were over 13,000 mass participants racing alongside(ish) the pros. Copenhagen is expecting 65,000. The Athens Marathon—the preferred host for the 2030 championship race—managed to include 73,000 participants in 2025 without even being deemed a global championship or major marathon. A lot of high-level track and field hinges on pinching pennies just to break even, but large marathons bring more than a few pennies along with them.
The challenge is to strike a balance between creating new moneymaking opportunities and spreading the talent too thin. In a recent Bill Simmons Podcast with guest knucklehead Chuck Klosterman, the pair of deep thinkers weighed in on whether it’s better in major sports to have a league commissioner who cares more about the health of the business or the spirit of the game.
Most diehard fans likely support the latter. But outside of the quadrennial Olympic Marathon—which is prestigious enough to cut through the concerns over missed appearance fees—the top athletes’ schedules are already punctuated by bag-chasing expeditions to wildly expensive mass-participation-driven races.
Because of the expanded prize pools at World Majors and other big city races, the race at the World Championships currently suffers from seriously diluted fields. It’s common for athletes to drop out once the going gets tough, to save their legs for races like Chicago and New York that—to put it bluntly—matter a whole lot more to them. (In the men’s races across 2023 and 2025, there were only 125 finishers and a whopping 47 DNFs.)
We’ve tried to make the World Marathon Championship matter before. In 1985, the IAAF introduced the World Marathon Cup, a team-based competition where each nation fielded five athletes, with the top three scoring via cumulative time. It was moderately successful for a period of time, but as prize money elsewhere increased, it was harder to drive the same level of interest from fans and broadcasters. The last standalone edition in 1995— held in Athens!—had 75 finishers plus 37 DNFs.
In 1997, the decision to combine the biennial event with the World Athletics Championships was made. The Cup concept persisted, but the team competition was overshadowed by the allure of individual medals, and in 2011 the World Marathon Cup ended.
But lessons were learned and things are different now!
First, this is an individual sport and the efforts to keep pushing team competition aren’t worth the effort. Team scoring is a unique and important aspect of cross country, but it’s not adding much to the road race scene. Can you, without checking, name the team podiums from half marathon at the 2023 champs?
Last year, 59,000+ people ran the New York City Marathon. When the race sold out, there were still virtual lines, tens of thousands deep, eager to pay hundreds of dollars for the experience. In 1985, only 15,000 people ran the five boroughs. The landscape of the sport has shifted, and grown to evolve the potential of this business model.
The World Marathon Cup didn’t focus on mass participation! (In 1991, the London Marathon hosted the event concurrently, so maybe that one did.) The reality is that 99% of marathon runners don’t care who wins, they care about themselves—and that’s perfectly fine. Their entry fees can still get spent. We’d love for some of the people who are inadvertently funding the professional side of things to absorb fandom through osmosis, but even if they don’t, their participation is still a positive.
The shift is no guarantee of success, particularly as the Abbott World Marathon Major circuit continues to expand. In 2030, there could be ten marathons of varying levels of prestige, and we won’t know how that will look or how much people will care until we get there. But compared to the World Championship marathon’s lackluster 2025 existence, it’s worth a try. We’d rather have a commissioner who cares about the health of the business than have no business at all.
Bring The Excitement Back To Professional Relays 🤝
April is a funny time for professional track and field. For athletes who gave indoors an honest effort, this month is about ramping back up following a mini-break. For athletes all-in on the late spring/early summer outdoor championship season, it’s still so early.
But there are still meets… big meets. Sure, most of them are geared toward getting hundreds of college athletes their NCAA regionals qualifier early, but they’re meets with a lot of history that invariably attract high-level pros as well. Usually they have the word “Relays” in the name and usually they’re somewhere warm.
Busting the rust usually looks very different for sprinters and distance runners. Distance runners that don’t want to come out swinging can move up or move down in distance, take on an event where they’re not going for national titles, and blame a bad performance on an ill-timed kick.
Sprinters looking to start off low-key have to get more creative. They might opt for the rarely-contested 150m or the bizarre, grass-track handicapped race against civilians we wrote about earlier in this newsletter. But historically, the bread and butter of elite sprinter’s early season competitive diet has come from hiding individual results in the form of joining an all-star relay squad.
The Texas and Florida Relays just took place, and while, yes, relays occurred, and in them high schoolers and collegians ran quickly, the primary takeaways came from field events, individual sprints, and wind-assisted high schoolers.
In Gainesville, Max Thomas clocked the second fastest 100m in the world this year, going 9.90. At the Texas Relays, Camryn Rogers extended her own Canadian and North American records in the hammer, thanks to an 81.13m heave; Gabby Thomas ran an early-world-leading 11.00 in the 100m; and two high schoolers ran historically fast (with some respectable tailwinds): Mariah Maxwell’s 22.25 200m puts her third on the all-time, all-conditions list behind just Allyson Felix and Dana Wilson; and Andrew Jones went 12.97 in the 110m hurdles, then followed it with a legal 13.15, good for #2 all-time among high schoolers.
Ideally, pros should race pros and the meat of the track and field season should focus on marquee matchups. But this is April. At relay carnival-type meets, let’s get the pros involved. Throw together an all-star squad or two from existing training groups, work out a schedule that works for your body over 1-3 days, and put on a show while busting the rust.
The closest thing we got to that this past weekend took place in Florida… just not at the Florida Relays. At the Miramar Invitational, Kishane Thompson set a world best 150m mark—on a regulation track—at 14.93. But from a pure excitement standpoint, we’ll be focusing on a race that featured a team of Texas high schoolers. They placed third in the 4x100m, just 0.04 seconds behind the winning Star Athletics squad, which featured Aaron Brown, Kenny Bednarek, Kyree King, and Courtney Lindsey.
A squad of true, professional Big Dogs, up against a squad of true professional Slightly Less Big Dogs (Sam Blaskowski, Pjai Austin, Brendon Stewart, and Brandon Hicklin), all looking to work out the kinks in a race atmosphere while getting in a good effort. None wanting an official mark to appear next to their names this early on in the season, but still… none of them wanting to lose, least of all to a bunch of kids yet to graduate high school.
The Bednarek-featuring appears to have raced twice, so this was clearly a workout for them. But still, they toed the line—while Thompson and Ackeem Blake headlined low-key open races. Between the men’s 100m and 150m, there were at least eight top Jamaican sprinters at the Ansin Sports Complex that day. What was stopping them from grabbing a dang baton and getting a rep or two in?!
This should be a no-lose situation: if you run fast, you get to strike a little extra fear in your competitors’ hearts and beat them head-to-head. If you mess up… no one can tell, really, in a 4x100m. Plus, you get the chance to hone the very same tools that could deliver you an extra medal or two in a championship setting, an opportunity that doesn’t pop up all that often mid-summer.
This isn’t a novel idea by any means. The USA vs. the World races at Penn Relays used to be a common site for world records and superstar appearances. If it’s good enough for Usain Bolt and Shelly-Ann Fraser-Pryce, it should be good enough for… well, pretty much anyone!
Now, to be fair, Penn Relays shelled out more than a few pretty pennies to put together those programs, so a truly star-studded relay showcase in April or May is likely a matter of budget (even for World Athletics…). But the next-best thing is to make a few calls, shuffle around the meet schedule if you have to, and get the sprinters that are already racing in Texas and Florida each April to put their rust-busters to more entertaining use. If we can’t get everybody to Torun or Gaborone, let’s meet them where they are—and put on a show.
One Affordable Ticket To Los Angeles, Please 🎟️
How much would you pay to be in the Coliseum when an American breaks the world record to win Olympic gold? Well, it’s going to cost you more than that! With the opening of the presale ticket portal, running fans have now received a harsh reality check, assuming they don’t have triathlon fan money.
The price to attend the afternoon session on July 16th will range from $104 to $2,460, but you’ve likely got better odds of finishing in the top three at the Trials than landing one of the small handful of seats at the lower price point. With five million people registering for a chance to buy the first batch of tickets, there is no shortage of demand, which is a rare thing in track and field.
Now this suggestion is likely too late to be implemented in 2028, but because this newsletter likes to operate in the theoretical, let’s make some suggestions that Brisbane could consider…
The Olympics are a spectacle – more than any one sport within the scope of the Games. You may not care about the teams playing, or even football at all, but you’d probably take tickets to the Super Bowl if offered. Everyone wants to go to stuff like this, to the detriment of actual fans.
The teams of the English Premier League have elaborate membership and loyalty programs to distribute tickets. No matter how often an American wakes up early to watch matches at 11th Street Bar Hall, they’re going to have to pay an arm and a leg to attend a Liverpool game in person. If you take the loyalty route, membership starts at $36. Then if a fan has 13+ matches from the previous season on their account, they’ll get tickets! If a new Liverpool fan hasn’t proven their loyalty, then they will walk alone… right into the lottery.
In Ireland, the most sought-after ticket aside from Kneecap is the GAA All-Ireland final, and yet there is never a public sale to get one. Since the not-for-profit organization is technically an amateur sport run by volunteers to oversee all aspects from the youth level on up, they leverage this demand to encourage fans to stay involved throughout the year. Tickets are distributed two ways: the first is by being a season ticket holder for the competing teams, which requires attending (and paying for) at least five matches.
The other route is the distribution through the local clubs. Regardless of which county makes the final, all clubs get tickets and offer them to those who have volunteered and stayed involved in the sport.
Do you see where this is going?
With some advance planning, it would be possible – maybe downright easy – for a host nation to use the Olympics to boost fan interest in niche sports over the months and years leading up to the event by rewarding those who make an effort. In our case, USATF could have pioneered a New York City Marathon-like “9+1” program that would make tickets for the 2028 Games available first and most affordably to the most dedicated fans. Imagine the boost the new USATF Tour circuit would get if you could get to LA28 by attending a certain number of meets!
Imagine a world where L.A. ticket access is aided by filling the stands at U.S. Championships, the Pre Classic, and the Millrose Games. All it would take is a little cooperation and advance planning from the U.S. Olympic organizers and track and field bigwigs. Okay, maybe that’s a tall order – but it’s worth imagining. Let’s make the magic of the Olympics work for us year-round.
More News From The Track And Field World 📰
– Nothin’ “Lille” about the performances from the Urban Trail de Lille races this past weekend! (Ha! HA!) Marta Alemayo, the 17-year-old World U20 XC champ from Ethiopia, won the women’s 5k in 14:15, good for #3 all-time; Jimmy Gressier now also sits at #3 all-time in the 5k after his 12:51 showing; and 10k world record-holder Agnes Ngetich dipped under 29 minutes for the second time, going 28:58 in the longer race. You’ve gotta feel bad for Khairi Bejiga—the dude won the 10k in 26:51 and that was the least exciting victory of the day.
– Both Jane Hedengren and Pamela Kosgei dipped under Parker Valby’s old NCAA 10,000m record (30:50.43) at the Stanford Invitational, with Hedengren breaking the tape at 30:46.80. At this point, you’ve gotta assume Hedengren is eyeing the 5000m-10,000m double at NCAAs, and it’s a pretty mild take to suggest she can break Valby’s outdoor 5000m record and her 10,000m meet record in the process.
– 400m World champion Collen Kebinatshipi ran 9.89 in both the 100m prelims and final at the Botswana Athletic Championships, becoming just the fourth man to dip under 44 for the 400m and 10 for the 100m.
– Nathan Martin, the come-from-behind winner of last month’s Los Angeles Marathon, provided a voiceover for a pre-game hype-up video produced by the NCAA ahead of the men’s collegiate basketball championship game, which Michigan won over UConn.
– The probably-should-have-been-winner from last week’s Berlin Half, Dennis Kipkemoi, is apparently coming to the NCAA next year. The 59:11 half marathoner—who stayed in the race as a pacer and appeared to let his teammate Andrea Kiptoo break the tape—says he’s signed with the University of Texas.
– Congratulations to Noah Lyles and Junelle Lyles (nee Bromfield) on their lovely wedding, which did not appear to include any anime-inspired celebrations!
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Love the track & field fan club concept.