A World Championship can feel like an embarrassment of riches for track fans and newsletter-writers alike. With so many exciting headlines and memorable performances, how do you focus on just a few?

Whether it’s Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone’s record-setting shadow or the chaos of the 1500m, it can be easy to get drowned by the content firehose and miss some of the most heartwarming, easy-to-miss but hard-to-forget moments of personal triumph and national pride that every global championship delivers.

Here are a few of the best ones:

Juleisy Angulo (javelin): We’d be shocked if more than a handful of regular Lap Count readers have ever thrown a javelin, let alone watched an entire competition from start to finish, so there’s a good chance many of you missed something really cool that happened in the women’s jav. One of the greatest things about a global championship is that despite there being obvious track and field powerhouse nations, there are always athletes hailing from a country without much of a tradition in a given event who show up, pull off something special, and become an overnight national hero. 

That’s exactly what happened for Juleisy Angulo of Ecuador, who threw PBs—and Ecuadorian national records!—in both qualifying and in the final to win the women’s javelin. Angulo entered her 2025 campaign having not competed once in 2024 while recovering from knee surgery, and boasting a modest 60.60m personal best. The now-24 year old showed promise as a junior and U23 athlete, picking up some hardware at various national and regional championships prior to this year, but when Angulo touched down in Tokyo this month, it was her first time qualifying for a global championship. But her 65.12m heave in the final was the best throw of any woman in the field, and she headed back to Ecuador as the country’s first ever World Championship female gold medalist, and first field event champion of any gender. 

Susanna Sullivan (marathon): Those who woke up early or stayed up late got a good look at American Susanna Sullivan, who led the women’s marathon for over 15 miles, mostly solo, before being overtaken by heavy hitters Peres Jepchirchir and Tigst Assefa around 30km. Sullivan then disappeared from the broadcast as fans were treated to an epic sprint finish between the 2021 Olympic champ and the second-fastest woman of all time. After Jepchirchir emerged victorious, the big story then became Julia Paternain, of Uruguay-slash-Flagstaff, who shocked the world—and herself—by securing the bronze in her second-ever marathon. Paternain is a Cinderella story unto herself, but if you followed along with Worlds you probably knew that already.

Sullivan, amazingly, did not completely crater once she lost the lead. Quite the opposite, in fact: she hung tough over the last 10km and ended up fourth in 2:28:17. Sullivan, a 35-year-old full-time teacher, recorded her highest career finish in a major or championship, and got to prove she could handle the tough weather conditions after finishing 58th in Budapest in 2023. It’s hard to compare times across courses, but between her 2:21:56 finish in Chicago last fall and the fact that she was just three minutes behind a 2:11 runner in Tokyo, it’s safe to say that Sullivan deserves to be part of any conversation about the best active American marathoners.

Abderrahman Samba (400m hurdles): Veteran hurdler Abderrahman Samba, who now represents Qatar, had the unfortunate luck of being the best hurdler in the world in 2018, the only year in the last decade to not end in a global championship. Before the “Big Three” were making sub-47 look routine, Samba clocked his 46.98 personal best, which was at the time the fastest mark in the world in 26 years. He did pick up a bronze medal the following season, in Doha, but injuries and the rise of his rivals have kept Samba off the podium for the last six years.

Fast-forward to 2025, and Samba—somehow still only 30 years old—has enjoyed something of a comeback season, clocking the second-best time of his career at the Paris Diamond League and finishing second in the DL final. And while it was disappointing to see Karsten Warholm fade in the second half of the final in Tokyo, Samba was perfectly positioned to capitalize and ecstatically claimed a second bronze behind Alison dos Santos and Rai Benjamin.

Kate O’Connor (heptathlon): 24-year-old Kate O’Connor is something of a pioneer in Irish athletics, as last summer she became the first heptathlete from the nation to compete at an Olympics and holds the top eight scores in the country’s history. She first came to prominence with a Commonwealth Games silver in 2022, but was never a factor at Worlds in 2023, finishing 13th. 2025 has been her breakout year, however, as O’Connor took silver at World Indoors and improved her heptathlon PB by over 400 points in two efforts this season.

The latter was a Herculean effort in Tokyo, where O’Connor set PBs in four of seven events, including a two-second improvement on her lifetime best to wrap up the competition in the 800m, claiming Ireland’s first ever global medal in the event. She finished ahead of reigning champ Katarina Johnson-Thompson of Team GB, the very athlete who beat her at that Commonwealth Games three years ago, which surely some of her Irish fans especially appreciated for inter-isle rivalry reasons.

Sage Hurta-Klecker (800m): Sage Hurta-Klecker has become such a reliable fixture on the Diamond League racing circuit that during the regular season it can be easy to forget that she’d never represented Team USA at a championships before this year. After years of bad luck and close misses at USAs, Hurta-Klecker wasn’t about to waste her first trip in a U.S. uniform. She ran a season’s best in the semifinal to snag the last time qualifier, and in the final itself she knocked nearly two full seconds off her PB to finish fifth in 1:55.89, joining the exclusive sub-1:56 club.

Hurta-Klecker is now the third-fastest American all time behind Athing Mu-Nikolayev and Ajee’ Wilson, and while she heads home without a medal, it took a few historic runs to keep her off the podium, as the top three finishers all broke 1:55. Not bad for a debut.

All that glitters is not gold, as they say—and there were plenty of sparkling performances buried deeper in the results list than the top step of the podium. And more often than not, the breakout stars of today are the established titans of tomorrow, so learn their names now, give them a hand, and become a lifelong fan.

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