At Least The U.S. Won At Pre ⏱️
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Compiled by David Melly, Paul Snyder, & Kyle Merber
Women’s Sprint Rivalries Are Keeping The Sport Alive 🔥
The 51st running of the Prefontaine Classic, a meet that always delivers both top-tier talent and absurd depth, had a big problem in the women’s 100m this year: there are too many women who are very good at the 100m.
Athletes like Tia Clayton (10.82 PB), Kayla White (10.84 PB), and Amy Hunt (2x British champ over 100m) found themselves on the outside looking in of the final as it took two stacked heats before the TV window to even decide who would toe the primetime start line. With two World champs, five of the seven fastest women of 2026, and four of the ten fastest women of all time on the entry list, the race was more stacked than many a World or Olympic final.
There were plenty of rich narratives, too. A generational battle—between the up-and-comers (Tina Clayton, Shawnti Jackson, and Adaejah Hodge) and the veterans (Shericka Jackson and Dina Asher-Smith), the Americans versus the Jamaicans, the Americans versus the Brits, and of course, a clash of training group alphas as Star Athletics’s two brightest stars, Melissa Jefferson-Wooden and Sha’Carri Richardson, both entered in fine form.
Longtime Richardson followers know her race is often decided in the first few steps: she is not the best starter in the world by any means, and when she’s off her game she can lay down some real clunkers out of the blocks. On the other hand, if she gets to her drive phase within spitting distance of the lead, she’s very, very dangerous in the back half. So when Richardson got the jump on Jackson and Jefferson-Wooden to her right, it was clear she’d be tough to beat.
Instead, Jackson and Hodge struggled mightily out of the blocks, and while Hodge still closed like a freight train to move up through the field, neither was able to challenge Richardson. No, it was her training partner and three-time World champ MJW who had the gears to beat her to the line. Jefferson-Wooden leaned her way to a 10.78 season’s best, just 0.01 ahead of Richardson.
A lot of hay is being made in sprint circles around Richardson’s general aversion to leaning at the line, but whether or not you think that made the difference in the race, the net result was that Jefferson-Wooden kept her 100m win streak alive: she hasn’t lost a race at the distance since taking bronze in the final in Paris.
After the finish line, Jefferson-Wooden was, for lack of a better term, fired TF up. Off the track, the American is polite and low-key, arguably one of the softer-spoken pro sprinters on the circuit. But in the heat of competition she gets as animated as anyone else in the whole stadium, glad to continue her run of dominance despite sharing in pre-race interviews that she’d had a less-than-ideal spring of training.
Richardson, who’s known for her showboating ways and high-energy presence, was more restrained this time around, but nevertheless looked pleased to have dropped her second sub-10.80 of the season. Despite her 10.65 PB and prodigious talent, this is only Richardson’s third season of dipping under the 10.8 barrier more than once. The others were her 2023 campaign that ended in a World title and her 2021 season that saw her win the Olympic Trials before her unfortunate post-facto disqualification. Early on this season, there were some questions around her health and fitness, but they’ve all been answered now.
This is arguably only the second season when both sprinters have been in top form at the same time. If you count the results from 2021, either Jefferson-Wooden or Richardson has won the 100m at the last five U.S. Championships, but MJW didn’t break 11 seconds in either 2021 or 2023 and Richardson only dipped below the barrier once last year. 2024, where both women landed on the podium in Paris, was the only season we’ve gotten prime Melissa vs. Sha’Carri to date. Sha’Carri has the lifetime edge in the 100m 6-5, but Sha’Carri got out to a 6-0 start and now Melissa has won their last five matchups. Now, the gap is literally one race and 1/100th of a second.
With the two best Americans in recent years performing their best right now, the 2026 national title at USAs will not come easy for anyone. On the international scene, the addition of Hodge and the resurgence of Jackson and her countrywoman Elaine Thompson-Herah virtually guarantees that no Diamond League or World Ultimate Championship will be a cakewalk. And that’s not even factoring in the Claytons, who are still just 21 years old, Pre fourth-placer Jonielle Smith, who got a PB of 10.89 in third, or… Olympic champion Julien Alfred, the only athlete in the world who’s shown she can beat both Richardson and Jefferson-Wooden at their best.
This is the best of track: a bevy of emotions, drama, and intrigue packed into nine lanes and ten seconds of racing. The time and the place matters: With all these young women running as well as they are, the 10.60 barrier—cleared only by two women in history—will inevitably see a battering any week now. And yet, at any given meet one of them could drop a top-ten all-time mark and not win.
So pick your fave and lock in. Because whether you want to see a rematch of the Star stars, a Jamaican revenge tour after getting shut out of the top-three at Pre, or a World vs. Olympic champ showdown for the ages, it’s coming. With each impending race, the plot only thickens, and even without the traditional prizes on offer this year, the bragging rights alone will take on a historic significance given the level of competition. They’re only just getting started.
Pre Proves Not All Rabbits Are Helpful 🐇
By nearly any metric, last weekend’s Pre Classic was a barn-burner of a meet, as it basically always is.
The women’s 100m was so exceptional that we dedicated the entire preceding section to it; Lilian Odira took down Keely Hodgkinson again in the 800m; Nikki Hiltz won their first Diamond League race ever, defeating the entire 2025 World Championship podium in the process; Masai Russell continued her incredible run over the 100m hurdles, tying the meet record at 12.24; Chase Jackson got the better of her Dutch rival in the shot; 19-year-old Tate Taylor upended the men’s 200m global pecking order with his 19.75 victory; Collen Kebinatshipi continued to make the case that he’s the best overall sprinter in the world, as he held off an impressive late charge from Rai Benjamin in the 400m; Cam Myers became the first Australian winner of the Bowerman Mile; Jamal Britt’s late career resurgence gained another data point with his 12.86 110m hurdles PR and meet record; Leonardo Fabbri threw a new world lead in the shot; Mykolas Alekna’s kept up his remarkable return from surgery with a 71.06m—non-Ramona!—toss in the discus.
Even some of the non-Diamond League events were notable! Zhang Jiale, the 19-year-old Chinese hammer phenom, beat Camryn Rogers with a personal-best heave of 77.94m, and Brandon Miller continued to explore his new late-charging strategy to great success in the men’s 800m, edging out Cooper Lutkenhaus and just about every healthy top American 800m man in the process.
However, we wouldn’t be track fans if we didn’t find something to grumble about amidst an otherwise delightful two-day span of athletics. And that thing was pacing in a handful of races.
In the women’s 800m, the rabbit split 53.58 at the 400m mark, well ahead of the pacing lights and even further up from any athlete with an intention of finishing the two-lap race. In the men’s 2 mile, the field essentially said “nope” to the rabbit and pace lights from the jump. In the women’s 2 mile, when the pacer stepped off after a 4:33 1600m, the leaders likewise stepped off the gas. And in the women’s mile, the pacer and lights were ignored from the get go.
Rabbit mess-ups led to interesting results: the women’s 800m still turned out to be an excellent race that saw plenty of shuffling of the field throughout the final 200m… the men’s 2 mile was another in a recent stretch of great races from Parker Wolfe… or the women’s 2 mile saw six athletes still in contention with 200m to go… and in the women’s mile, the fact that it wasn’t a 4:13 race as called for likely made Hiltz’s upset possible.
No matter how exhilarating the outcome of a distance or middle-distance race, whenever there’s a visual reminder of the gap between how fast people are running and how fast they at one point claimed to want to go, there’s going to be disappointment. A pacer mishandling the assignment is one thing, and easily dismissible as such. But pace lights blinking along 20+ feet ahead of the field is simply a bad look that screams “a week ago I wanted the world record but now I’ve got cold, spiked feet.”
Diamond League pacesetting is a careful dance between ambition and adaptability. More often than not, the fault lies not with the pacers themselves, but with the athletes refusing to chase them. Understanding and quickly responding to shifting race dynamics is a commendable part of racing savvy, but the visual weirdness of abandoned-pace efforts needs to be addressed.
The range of possible solutions range from Vaudvillian to Ludditistic, and just about all of them are infeasible, but hey… let’s run through them anyway.
Get rid of pacing lights entirely
This one isn’t gonna happen. They’re extremely useful and clearly help athletes keep up with brisk paces once human rabbits step off. We like seeing world records, and really, records of any sort fall. Accordingly, meet directors would probably rather deal with minor blowback from the iffy visual of lights dropping athletes like at Pre, if the tradeoff is a 5% increase in the likelihood of a world record, should everything go perfectly. It does feel like there should be a moment, however, in a comically slow race where someone simply makes the executive decision to kill the power.
Implement an “all-you-can-eat sushi”-inspired penalty system
Most all-you-can-eat sushi establishments have a policy: you pay extra for any sushi you or your party are unable to consume. This keeps people from attempting to abuse the system or doing the very cool but reckless “I’ll have one of everything” move, unless they are extremely hungry or dining with an entire NFL offensive line.
Why not apply something similar on the DL circuit? In most rabbited races, the pace is dictated by one or two athletes. Should those athletes not go with the rabbit, they should be fined a percentage of their appearance fee for every lap they fail to do so. If it was the meet director who got greedy and asked for an unreasonable pace, then they should be required to run an all-out 400m at the conclusion of the race, and if they don’t complete their penalty lap within two seconds of what they predict they will run, they have to go again.
Pull ineffective rabbits off the track with a giant cane
If a rabbit opens up a gap so large on the field that it becomes unseemly, a dedicated prop comic employed by the meet should use a giant cane to yank them off the track. The crowd will love the little taste of slapstick comedy, and once the speeding rabbit gets the hook, all attention goes back to pure, time-agnostic, unfettered racing.
Borrow a concept from cycling
Even a rabbit hitting the prescribed paces perfectly can wind up in no-man’s land. The big dogs sometimes simply forego the slipstream. Yes, unfortunately these pace-setters will still get the hook, but rather than allow the pace to wallow, we can utilize financial incentives to get somebody else in the competitive field to become a de facto rabbit.
In criterium-style bike racing, riders can earn a prime (pronounced “preem”) for leading the race at key intervals. Sure, a dominant rider could theoretically ride from the front the entire time, gobbling up payouts en route to victory. But the typical outcome is that a few athletes without a shot in hell of winning say “screw it,” blast off to the front, quicken the pace for everyone else, battle for their bonus, then die an honorable death.
On the track in any given race, at least half the field will likely recognize within a lap or two that this isn’t going to be their day. Chasing a halfway prime allows these runners to salvage what would otherwise be a bust of a race at best or a DNF at worst. If this system is good enough for the Fifth Avenue Mile every year, it’s good enough for the track.
The Silent Treatment
This one doesn’t help the fans in the stands, but there are several ways a TV broadcast can help address the issue. The cameras themselves can simply choose to ignore the pacer and the lights, which keeps the focus on the actual race dynamics playing out. More importantly, commentators can actually talk about the race in front of them, not the race they wish was happening. There’s nothing more frustrating than watching a thrilling sprint finish and having the first words out of the announcers’ mouths be “So-and-so just misses the meet record!” There’s even an argument to be made to not let announcers see the clock at all to force them to do their darn job: calling the race in front of them.
World records rarely fall, even under the most advantageous conditions with optimal pacing. Great racing can happen at any time, anywhere. And even with some serious real estate between the lights and the action a handful of times at Pre, we got plenty of great racing.
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The Wind-Aided 9.67 Heard ‘Round The World 🌍
When Marcell Jacobs won the 2020/2021 Olympics, this newsletter’s subtitle for the write-up on the victory was simply titled, “Wait, who?”
Remember, the Italian had been a long jumper until 2018 and it wasn’t until a couple months before shooting to stardom that he first dipped below the 10-second barrier. His then-personal best of 9.95 would be broken in the Olympic prelims, semi-finals, and finals, where Jacobs earned the most prestigious medal in the world.
Naturally, there was speculation. Coming out of lockdown—a quiet spell for the sport—Jacobs’s seemingly sudden ascension raised yellow flags for many fans. How could someone no one had ever heard of would suddenly be the fastest man in the world? His mixed bag of results that followed only added to the confusion. The next year he won the World Indoor Championships 60m. He then DNS’d the semi-finals at the World Championships, before bouncing back and winning the European Championships, albeit in a time of 9.95—a far cry from his still personal best of 9.80.
In 2023, Jacobs didn’t break ten seconds. In 2024, scratching from previously announced meets became common practice. But when it mattered most, he tended to step up, winning the European title and then finishing fifth in the Olympic final in Paris.
Then it was like rewatching the same movie again in 2025: no World final and a season’s best of 10.16. The online ridicule returned, and the once-massive appearance fees almost certainly started to dry up.
The narrative in track and field is that medals are what matter most. And Jacobs has proven time and time again that he can show up in the most pressure-filled moments. Between the Olympics, Worlds, and Europeans he has nine medals. Medals are what matter most, but the regular season is where narratives are shaped. He has only run in eight Diamond League meets through his career, without winning any and often losing by quite a significant margin. And that’s why such a large gap exists between his reputation and his legacy-defining accomplishments.
This past week, however, Marcell Jacobs’s name was back in headlines, thanks to a regular season mark! At a windy meet in Austria—one you likely didn’t know was happening—he ran 9.67 with a significant tailwind of +4.1 m/s. That performance makes him the second fastest man ever (in all-conditions) behind only Usain Bolt. Even without the wind, that’s worth about a 9.84, an objectively strong mark.
It certainly doesn’t prove that he is the second-best sprinter ever, or even the best this year. However it does prove that five years after coming out of nowhere, Marcell Jacobs is still relevant. Does hindsight help explain that 2021 performance? We weren’t ready to digest it then, but maybe we are now with the benefit of additional context. While some athletes win the Olympics to put an exclamation point on their careers, others first announce themselves via Olympic gold.
Critics have long lambasted Marcell Jacobs—at best as a one-hit wonder who got lucky, and at worst as a potential cheater. But the reality appears to be less sensational: he’s proven himself to be an exceptionally talented, yet injury-prone athlete.
At 31, Jacobs does not appear to be done. After a two-year stint in Florida, Jacobs is now back training under his old coach, Paolo Camossi, and it seems to be working. Winning a blustering 100m at a Continental Tour silver meet isn’t exactly enough to make him the presumptive favorite for World Ultimates, but that result does chip away at previous misconceptions. It may be insane to refer to an Olympic champion as an underdog, but if you’re cheering for Jacobs, it certainly feels like you’re rooting for one.
More News From The Track And Field World 📰
– Rest in peace to Jamaican coaching legend and co-founder of the MVP Track & Field Club, Stephen Francis. Francis coached—among many other exceptional sprinters—Shelly-Ann Fraser-Pryce, Asafa Powell, Elaine Thompson-Herah, Shericka Jackson, and Kishane Thompson. He was 64.
– Former Villanova standout Haftu Strintzos lowered the Australian and Oceania area marathon record to 2:06:20 thanks to his win at the Gold Coast Marathon. Ethiopia’s Almaz Kebebe—just 20 years old—claimed the women’s title in 2:24:53.
– At the Meeting Stanislas Nancy in Tomblaine, France, Francesco Pernici lowered the men’s Italian 800m record to 1:43.60 and Frenchman Anas Lagtiy Chaoudar led a competitive 1500m field at 3:31.40; France’s Clara Liberman broke the tape in the women’s 800m at 1:58.90, while Adèle Gay dominated the 1500m, going 4:01.21.
– Summer signing news dump! Colin Sahlman and Gracie Morris have joined Swoosh TC; Sanu Jallow-Lockhart and Gary Martin are now Brooks Beasts; Marco Langon now represents Diadora professionally, after working with the brand in an NIL capacity; and freshly minted world record holder Ja’Kobe Tharp has signed with Adidas.
– The IOC has lifted its suspension of the Russian Olympic Committee, meaning Russian athletes can compete internationally again… unless they are track and field athletes, because World Athletics voted to maintain its ban on Russian and Belarusian athletes from international competition.
– French hammer throw record holder Yann Chaussinand has apparently broken the world record in the toilet toss.
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Cmon now ain’t no section for tate taylor’s 19.75??? ik high schoolers are more commonly dropping crazy times but that was the performance of the meet he beat the olympic champion, and yall put a single line on it. 🤦♂️🤦♂️