By David Melly
June 24, 2026
As we approach the halfway point of the Diamond League season, only three runners have won every DL competition on offer in their preferred event: Alison dos Santos, Soufiane El Bakkali, and Emma Zapletalová.
Dos Santos is the 2022 World champion in the 400m hurdles, a four-time global medalist, and the third fastest man of all time. El Bakkali is a four-time global champ in the steeplechase. And Zapletalová is… probably not an athlete many fans outside of Slovakia knew by name before last year.
The 26-year-old entered 2025 with a 54.28 personal best from four years earlier, and her fastest 400H in the last three seasons was only 57.26. Injuries cost her the entire 2023 season and she only raced three times in 2024, but Zapletalová turned things around in 2025, finishing second in three different DLs and putting a bow on things with a bronze medal at Worlds in Tokyo.
This year, she picked up where she left off, and then some, setting an indoor 400m PB of 50.78 and, most recently, winning the first four 400m hurdles on the Diamond League circuit. Outside of a cool, breezy day in Oslo, she’s improved her PB every time out, dipping under 53 seconds and getting all the way down to 52.30 last week in Doha.
In a few short weeks, Zapletalová has moved from #29 to #6 on the all-time list. She’s beaten three of the five women ahead of her this season head to head (Jasmine Jones, Dalilah Muhammad, and Anna Cockrell). With Femke Broeders-Bol focusing on the 800m and Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone expecting her first child, a new star has emerged in the 400m hurdles.
Is that all this is, though? A void left by two giants in an event (with less relative depth) gets filled by a “best of the rest”?
Not so fast: Zapletalová is no also-ran.
Only three times in the last five seasons has an athlete not named Femke [pre-Broeders] Bol won a DL 400H with a mark under 53 seconds. Muhammad, Cockrell, and Shiann Salmon have each done it once. Remember: Zapletalová has done it three times this year. Her resume is starting to look a lot like Broeders-Bol’s than anyone else’s, a clear sign she’s moving out from the crowd and into some very rarefied air.
It’s hard to compare times across eras, but it’s still worth noting that Zapletalová has leapfrogged big names like Olympic champions Lashinda Demus and Melanie Walker. She’s now bettered every time in the pre-Dalilah era, and her 52.30 in Doha would’ve landed her on the podium of every global championship except for the 2020 2021 and 2024 Olympic finals.
The case for Zapletalová being a true-blue, no-matter-who’s-on-the-track contender is rock solid at this point. If the injury bug doesn’t return to bite her, it may start to look once again like the podium spots at World and Olympic championships are pretty much spoken for, even with Muhammad threatening to retire every season. And we shouldn’t make any assumptions on finish order, either, given that this new and improved version of Zapletalová hasn’t gone head-to-head against McLaughlin-Levrone or Broeders-Bol, and thus, hasn’t been pushed to an even faster time by the event’s undisputed all-time number one or two.
Given the known absence of its two brightest stars, heading into this year it was easy to assume that the women’s 400m hurdles would be either a) boring or b) evenly-matched, but at a lower level of competition overall. So far, neither possibility has come to pass. Sure, Zapletalová winning every week may not exactly be thrilling in its unpredictability, but it’s way more exciting to see how long she can sustain this newfound dominance than to watch Femke pick up her 45th circuit victory. Since she’s gotten faster and faster every week, the conversation will inevitably move to just how close she can get to gold-medal contention even with FBB and SML returning.
The lesson here is clear: the track and field universe works in mysterious ways. An empty throne will never remain empty for long. Whether it’s new runners rising through the ranks, athletes sensing an opportunity and switching events, or long-toiling veterans getting their time to shine, the vacuum will eventually incent and incite greatness. Emma Zapletalová saw her chance and took it, and good luck taking her down now that she’s on top.
David Melly
Since David began contributing to CITIUS in 2018, he's done a little bit of everything, from podcast hosting to newsletter writing to race commentary. Currently, he coordinates the social media team and manages both the CITIUS MAG newsletter and The Lap Count, supplying hot takes and thoughtful analysis in both short- and long-form. Based on Boston, David breaks up his excessive screen time by training for marathons, crewing trail races, baking sweet desserts, and mixing strong cocktails.
