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Compiled by David Melly, Paul Snyder, & Kyle Merber
An Ode To Unexpected World Records ✍️
Predicting what will happen at track meets is a finicky business.
If you time-traveled back to newsletter time last week and told your past self that two world records would fall at the Weltklasse Zurich meet, it’s a fair guess that you’d have tuned in Thursday expecting to see a double-WR in the men’s and women’s 800m. Audrey Werro was once again toeing the line in front of a home crowd in historically great shape; and this time with Commonwealth Games champ-slash-World-medalist Georgia Hunter Bell to push her to the line. Emmanuel Wanyonyi was running a non-DL 800m placed smack in the middle of the television broadcast with two pacers set to come through 600 meters in 1:14 and change. So it’s understandable to think that either, or both, would make history.
They both ended up running fast—Werro breaking the Diamond League record for the third time this year with a 1:53.70 and Wanyonyi setting a new world lead of 1:41.76—but neither was particularly close to the respective #1 all-time marks. Instead, it was a pair of hurdlers who stole the show: Masai Russell, who became the first wind-legal sub-12.10 runner in history in the 100m hurdles, and Alison dos Santos, who took the 400m hurdles in a mind-blowing 45.80. Ironically, in both races the runner-up was the now-former world record holder. Tobi Amusan ran a season’s best 12.23 behind Russell’s barrier-breaking 12.09, and Karsten Warholm clocked a perfectly respectable 46.69 for second behind dos Santos.
Even prior to Zurich, Russell and dos Santos were the world leaders in their events, but neither race was billed as a “world record attempt.” They became the fourth and fifth athletes to set world records on the track this year (plus a handful of indoor and road records), and after Ja’Kobe Tharp’s world-record run at NCAAs, three of four standard-event hurdles records have fallen in 2026. Interestingly, neither is the reigning World champion in their record-setting event, and coincidentally, both are 26 years old. (The pictures of the two of them were also pretty funny as Russell is 5’4” and dos Santos is 6’7”.)
That being said, it’s unfair to say either hurdler came out of nowhere. Masai Russell: World Record Holder felt like an increasing inevitability this season as the Olympic champ got both faster and more consistent. Across her last eight races, she’s broken 12.30 in all but one, and she’d already reset her own American record in May. The surprise, perhaps, came in the location. The former meet record was held by Amusan at 12.29, run in the same 2022 season she set the 12.12 prior mark, so it’s not like Zurich was known as a particularly fast hurdling track.
Alison dos Santos, for his part, was the third-fastest man in history heading into last week and had beaten Warholm head-to-head three times already this season. But if you were betting on someone to break Warholm’s record this year, the odds-on favorite would’ve been World/Olympic champ Rai Benjamin, coming off a huge 43.83 personal best in the flat 400m. That being said, the last man to beat Benjamin in a hurdles race was—you guessed it—dos Santos at last year’s Prefontaine Classic.
So where do these performances rank in terms of how unexpected they were this year? And while we’ve already learned the folly of trying to predict the next world record again and again, which is most likely to go down next?
From least to most surprising:
5. Emmanuel Wanyonyi, 2:11.83, 1000 meters (7/10/2026): It felt like the 1000m world record had been living on borrowed time since Marco Arop gave it a scare, running 2:13.13 back in 2024. The combination of Arop and Wanyonyi in their coincident primes, plus all the 1500m training they had to do for Grand Slam Track last year (LOL remember that?), meant that all it really took was the right race being scheduled at the right time with an appropriately-enticing appearance fee. As it turned out, Wanyonyi was pushed to the line by Jake Wightman, not Arop, but given that he could’ve run 1:41 and then jogged in a 30-second 200m and still gotten the record, this one was more of a “when,” not “if.”
4. Josh Kerr, 3:42.66, one mile (7/18/2026): We’ve previously discussed why Hicham El Guerrouj’s 3:43 was fairly gettable in terms of distance records. In short, it’s not an outrageous ask to get an established 3:27 1500m runner to leg out an extra 109 meters. Unlike the 1000m, however, the mile record has been attacked with more frequency and survived until this summer, so it gets a bump up to fourth place as a result.
3. Masai Russell, 12.09, 100m hurdles (8/27/2026): Entering this season, Russell was just 0.05 seconds away from Amusan’s mark, but before 2026, consistency was something of a high hurdle (pun intended) for Russell to clear and the Olympic champ was coming off a disappointing fourth-place finish at Worlds in Tokyo. But when the 12.20s started becoming increasingly routine and Russell lowered her American record to 12.14, the top spot on the list started looking more and more achievable. The one thing Russell had going against her was USAs not taking place at the hurdle-friendly Hayward Field… but now that she’s run 12.20 or faster on four different continents, a fast track is more of a luxury than a necessity.
2. Alison dos Santos, 45.80, 400m hurdles (8/27/2026): Alison dos Santos is a generational talent in the hurdles, to be sure, but the two biggest strikes against him were 1) the perception that Rai Benjamin would get there first and 2) a slight plateauing in his recent results. Since running his prior PB of 46.29 in 2022, he hadn’t come within 0.3 seconds before this season; his last two years featured SBs of 46.63 and 46.65. So knocking 0.49 seconds off his PB and 0.63 seconds off his SB in Zurich was a welcome surprise to be sure. One could also reasonably assume that, with the Diamond League final and World Ultimates still to come, dos Santos would’ve been two or three weeks away from his full and final taper of the year, and that his legs in Zurich wouldn’t be in tip-top shape. And one would be wrong.
1. Ja’Kobe Tharp, 12.75, 110m hurdles (6/10/2026): Of all the world records set this season, Tharp’s was the one that really came out of nowhere. Well, maybe not nowhere, as the Auburn hurdler won USAs at 19 years old last summer and World Juniors the summer before. But it’s safe to say that no one would’ve placed a Kalshi bet on Tharp lopping 0.26 seconds off his personal best in one race in the prelims of NCAAs. Tharp then proved it was no fluke, running 12.90, 12.85, and 12.89 in his next three races, but given that he wasn’t even in the top five fastest active Americans when the year started, his singular breakthrough was pretty unexpected.
Where next?
Audrey Werro and/or Keely Hodgkinson and/or Femke Broeders-Bol’s season-long attack on the 800m all-time list is the obvious place to look, but they’re not alone in being well-positioned to lengthen the list of WRs falling in 2026.
One such mark that feels analogous to the 800m, where an established star (Hodgkinson) is being pushed to new levels by the competition (Werro), is the women’s steeplechase, where the second-, third-, and fourth-fastest competitors of all time are going head-to-head several times a season. At 22 years old, World champ Faith Cherotich has risen to the level of—and often above—Winfred Yavi and Peruth Chemutai, the last two Olympic champs, and Zurich saw NCAA champ Doris Lemngole quietly crack the top-ten all time with an 8:55.96 PB behind Cherotich. Beatrice Chebet’s 8:44.32 got a scare from Yavi each of the last two seasons, and with more competition pushing her to the line, it may finally go.
The other obvious one is the men’s pole vault, where Mondo Duplantis is his own best competition… although! We saw something we’d never seen before in Zurich. Manolo Karalis became the only non-Mondo vaulter in history to clear 6.20m, and two, count ‘em, jumpers were both attempting (one more realistically than the other), a new WR of 6.32m at the competition’s end. While Karalis’s ascent has been great to watch, the most likely outcome will be Mondo breaking his own record for the umpteenth time, but maybe a little sweat on his neck is exactly what he needs to soar to new heights.
The last, more outside-the-box, event to watch is the men’s triple jump. In the good ol’ days of the 2010s, Christian Taylor was the heir apparent who seemed best positioned to knock off Jonathan Edwards’s 18.29m WR from 1995, but last month in Birmingham it was Andy Diaz Hernandez who, at 30 years old, put his name in contention with an 18.15m leap to win the European title and join the exclusive 18-meter club. There are now three active members of that nine-member club (although Jordan Diaz Fortun hasn’t jumped in 2026), although, unlike Taylor, none of the three have done it more than once. Diaz Hernandez does have three of the four longest efforts in the world this year, however, and he’ll have another opportunity to go big in Brussels.
Technically, every race is a world record attempt; most of them just have pretty bad odds of coming to fruition. If Zurich taught us anything, however, it’s to stay on our toes. The 2026 season has been full of surprises already, and with the Great Unknown that is a two-day “final” leading into a three-day “championship” in September, anything can happen.
An Ode To Longevity 🧓
When it comes to naming the best NBA player of all time, there are two possible correct answers: Michael Jordan or LeBron James. Which one you personally favor may be heavily influenced by your relation to the city of Chicago, or whether or not you were born prior to 1990. But for those interested in removing as much nostalgic bias as possible when selecting your men’s basketball G.O.A.T., it’s worth assessing what you value most in greatness.
Let’s pivot (Ha! Get it?) away from basketball for a moment toward track and field. There are plenty of ways to measure greatness for our sport as well, but our more-numerically-focused one is broken down neatly into events—both factors make the task of answering “who’s the best?” a lot simpler, but not necessarily easier.
It would be simple to say the greatest ever track and field athlete in any given event is that event’s world record holder. Of course that’s reductive—as context is everything. Running fast one time may make an athlete the fastest ever, but we are looking to debate greatness. Josh Kerr is the fastest miler ever, but not many would argue he is the greatest… yet. But still. It’s an argument one could make.
Michael Jordan led the Bulls to six NBA Finals, where they won all six. Lebron James only has four rings. Therefore he is worse than Jordan, right? Well, not exactly. Lebron was in six other NBA finals, although he lost those. Depending on your perspective that either helps or hurts an argument for his greatness.
An athlete winning one race or a gold medal on a perfect day alone is not generally enough for most fans to assign somebody with the “greatest ever” superlative. No. We like to look at individual accolades, team accomplishments, height of an athlete’s ceiling as well as its duration—how long were they truly great?—before making a call.
So it’s worth noting, for holistic evaluation purposes, that LeBron basically wrote the book on long-lasting consistency. Across 23 seasons and counting, his regular season point tally currently sits at 43,440—that’s ten thousand more points than Michael Jordan scored in his career.
Nothing this running newsletter will write about an ongoing and unwinnable basketball debate will change your mind. But it does highlight an underappreciated aspect in running: longevity.
Staying healthy and consistent is difficult as a 20-year-old Olympic-level track athlete. Once you’re north of 30, it can feel genuinely impossible. And as the sport progresses forward, an athlete’s personal best is no longer going to be representative of how great they were because times are evolving. Referring to Jim Ryun as merely a 3:51 miler in 2026 does not accurately depict how much faster he was than everyone else in 1966. Just like focusing on how Michael Jordan at sixth on the all-time point leaders list doesn’t do justice to his dominance.
As this track season heads toward its conclusion, the majority of attention and glory will be focused on the winners of the Diamond League and World Ultimate Championships. But the athletes who have continued to be competitive deep into their careers are well-deserving of adoration.
At a quick glance, here are the oldest athletes in each running event that dipped below the 2027 World Championship standard (which is not yet open):
M100m: Emmanuel Eseme (33)
W100m: Elaine Thompson-Herah (34)
M200m: Aaron Brown (34)
W200m: Shaunae Miller-Uibo (32)
W400m: Marileidy Paulino (29)
M800m: Mark English (33)
W800m: Renelle Lamote (32)
M1500m: Azeddine Habz (33)
W1500m: Nelly Jepkosgei (35)
MSC: Soufiane El Bakkali (30)
WSC: Marwa Bouzayani (29)
M5000m: Andreas Almgren (31)
W5000: Maureen Koster (34)
M110H: Antonio Alkana (36)
W100H: Danielle Williams, Keni Harrison (both 34, with birthdays four days apart)
M400H: Abderrahaman Samba (30)
W400H: Dalilah Muhammad (36)
2026 will be remembered for the many world records that have been broken.
But let’s also pause to recognize that Dalilah Muhammad has the fifth fastest time in the world this year, long after first medaling at Worlds all the way back in 2013. Is it not incredible that Mark English is winning his first European title and running personal bests 14 years after first running 1:45? How cool is it that Emmanuel Eseme won his first Commonwealth Games at 33? Imagine being Antonio Alkana and still somehow being flexible enough to touch your toes at 36, let alone to run 13.18 over hurdles. Will we finally learn to never doubt Shaunae Miller-Uibo as she returns to the top after becoming a mother of two? And just when Elaine Thompson-Herah appears to be human after all, she dips back under 11 seconds!
The kids may be getting faster, but plenty of the greats have found a way to stay fast. While it’s exciting to see so many prodigies coming of age and moving into the upper echelon of the sport, let’s also pour one out for those who aren’t just old enough to drink, but old enough to appreciate a non-alcoholic beer with a sensible 5:30pm dinner, too.
An Ode To The Runners’ Wedding 💍
Do all wedding bands tell dance floors that they’re the best crowd they’ve ever seen, just a few songs into their set? Or is that just a runners’ wedding thing?
If you have been fortunate enough to attend the nuptials between two runners, bringing at least two sets of former teammates together, then you have likely heard this compliment. There’s something about the first few notes of a middling early 2000s dance pop hit that sends a crowd of thinning-haired ex-competitive runners into a state of euphoria—right back in the flow state of a beer-drenched post-Nationals house party.
Most weddings are fun! But most weddings don’t feature six-mile group runs as the anchor of the weekend’s agenda. It’s not in most cultures’ tradition to do coffee and bagels from a trailhead. Heading out for early miles with a pack of equally washed up athletes-turned-parents brings out feelings of cross country camp nostalgia, only this time, with hangovers.
We tear up when the father of the bride proudly retells the stories of discovering his daughter was faster than the rest of her class and his amazement when college coaches started leaving voicemails on the family answering machine. The best man tells a story about a conference meet you can vividly recall, and brings the house down with the name drop of an obscure high school rival who you haven’t thought about since losing to them at the state meet.
There’s a special bond that only running thousands of miles together can create between friends. And to know, grow, and struggle together with a group that shared the best four years of their lives together, only to then meet another, equally bizarro group of friends that did the same thing, only slightly differently… it creates an instant and symbiotic dynamic. There are names on the guest list that you recognize from results two decades ago. You might’ve only shaken their hand after a race to say good job, but it feels like you’re old pals because you periodically exchange kudos with one another on Strava.
The curated playlist rehashes songs that you once downloaded to your iPod Touch before a long bus ride. Half an hour in, the dancing gets sloppy. But there’s no side-eyeing—just understanding. These are the people who were there when you drank your first beer, after all. They’ve seen worse. It’s all silly fun.
Shirts come off when “Mr. Brightside” comes on, elated shrieking drowns out the entirety of “Dancing on My Own,” and you realize that you somehow know every word to a Jason DeRulo song you hadn’t heard in a decade. GPS watches note steadily elevating heart rates. It’s like an off-season celebration after everyone went dry. No one is pacing themselves or showing signs of fatigue as the night goes on.
No matter how far removed from their competitive primes they may be, these are endurance athletes at work, after all. Runners are different, and that’s why we like to marry each other. It makes for a fun party.
More News From The Track And Field World 📰
– The Sydney Marathon—which, as you’ll remember, is a World Major—was held Sunday in Australia. Addisu Gobena bested in the men’s field in 2:04:42, a new course record; while Peres Jepchirchir, the reigning World champ, won the women’s battle in 2:18:31, which put her over three minutes ahead of second place.
– At the Grand Prix Brescia, 2024 Olympic bronze medalist Rajindra Campbell threw a new PB of 22.59 to win the shot; Favour Ofili won the 200m in 22.03; Nickisha Pryce nipped Salwa Eid Naser at the line in the 400m as both athletes were credited with 49.27 clockings; and Shafiqua Maloney won a competitive 800m battle in 1:58.03.
– Berlin’s ISTAF similarly saw a handful of stellar performances: Cam Myers went 3:30.96 to win the men’s 1500m; Nigist Getachew won the women’s 800m in 1:58.04 (that seems to be the time most high-end races are won in that don’t feature Werro!); Gesa Krause ran a world lead in the steeple… the rarely contested 2000m steeple, going 5:56.79; and most notably, Chase Jackson broke her own American record in the shot with a 21.02m heave—the second best toss in the world in the last 14 years.
– Though lacking its most prominent athlete, Switzerland’s GalAthletics Bellinzona still produced some notable performances. Kanyinsola Ajayi led three men under 10 seconds in the 100m, taking the win in 9.91 (+0.0); Mykolas Alekna threw the discus 71.50m—making this the fifth competition in which he’s thrown past 70 meters in 2026; Rénelle Lamote won a close women’s 800m in—what else?—1:58.55; and Nadia Battocletti stepped down in distance and won the women’s 1500m in 3:57.54, an Italian national record.
– And at the International Wiesław Maniak Memorial, Raevyn Rogers won the 800m in 1:58.86, keeping that particular trend very much alive.
– UTMB—an event somebody somewhere has probably called “the Super Bowl of ultrarunning” took place over the weekend around Mont Blanc in the French Alps. Over the signature ~100 mile distance, French-dwelling American Ben Dhiman (18:16:29) won the men’s race while actual French person Blandine L’Hirondel won the women’s in 21:54:49; in the ~100 kilometer CCC race, Italy’s Cristian Minoggio was the top finisher in 10:21:48, with Yngvild Kaspersen of Norway was the top woman in 12:01:14; and over the ~50 kilometer OCC course, France’s Frédéric Tranchand (5:10:08) and America’s Lauren Gregory (6:08:07) prevailed.
– Indianapolis has been announced as the host site for the 2027 and 2028 U.S. Indoor Track & Field Championships, ending a nine-year stretch of hosting dominance by the three-headed monster that is Staten Island, Albuquerque, and Spokane.
– We’ll have to wait a little longer to see what the new marathon world record holder’s follow-up performance looks like. Sabastian Sawe has bowed out of this month’s Berlin Marathon field, citing injury.
– ATHLOS has announced the cancellation of its 2026 New York City meet, but plans to proceed as planned with its London competition.
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