By Owen Corbett
July 10, 2023
The final day of the USATF National Championships went out with a bang. Since nearly every race was a final, the action was nonstop as the remaining 15 U.S teams were formed to fill out the squad headed to Budapest. We saw several reigning World champions back up their lofty expectations, many athletes making their first ever global team, and some surprise members nabbing spots from established stars. On top of all that, a few championship records and world leads showed that the best of America have what it takes when they take on the rest of the world in – checks calendar – only 40 days! Let’s go ahead and unpack the biggest surprises from the finale of the weekend.
We Slept on Kayla White:
Kayla White had beaten Abby Steiner before, but that was four years ago against a 19-year-old freshman at Kentucky, not the Steiner who finished fifth at Worlds. At the start of the weekend, you would be hard-pressed to find many fans predicting that Steiner would be left off the U.S 200m team headed to Budapest, but after a fourth-place finish, that is where she stands. White, on the other hand, was on very few people’s radars as she came in tied for the 10th-fastest American at the distance this year and her previous highest finish at USAs was 7th. How unlikely was this result? Each of Steiner’s six 200m performances this season prior to this weekend were all faster than White’s season’s best, which she dropped by a whopping 0.37 seconds in the final. White was not the only surprise third place finisher to share her name, by the way. In the women’s 800m, Kaela Edwards (yes, I know the spelling is different) wasn’t being predicted in anyone’s top three but ran a strong race to make her first World Championships team.
Sub-13 Guys Get Blanked:
Grant Fisher, Joe Klecker, and Woody Kincaid – in any order you liked them – were by far the most popular picks for the men’s 5000m team. Fisher started the surprises when he pulled out of the race earlier in the day with a stress injury to his femur. Once the gun went off, even more chaos ensued. While most of the heavy hitters waited out a lukewarm pace in the middle of the pack, Abdihamid Nur took the lead with 1000m to go and never looked back. Nur and Paul Chelimo both closed their last kilometer in a 2:21 and earned the top two spots. Sean McGorty replicated his 3rd-place performance from the 10k over half the distance but once again does not have the World standard, a consequence of this being his first weekend of racing this year. If that does not change, Klecker will sneak onto the team as the 4th-place finisher. Kincaid, on the other hand, did not have his signature kick and the 10k winner finished 9th.
Kerley’s Undefeated 2023 Comes To An End:
Fred Kerley chose a bad day to lose his first races since he pulled up with a hamstring injury in the 200m at Worlds last year. His 3rd-place finish in his semi-final earlier in the day relegated him all the way out to lane 9 for the final, where he finished 0.01 seconds off the podium behind Texas Tech’s Courtney Lindsey. Kerley still has his status as the inarguable favorite in the 100m when Budapest rolls around, and he is one of the rare athletes to also possess a World medal in the 400m, but has yet to have everything break the right way for him in the 200m. A future World medal in the event would cement Kerley as the greatest 100m/200m/400m sprinter when performances at all three distances are taken into account.
Field Eventers Go All The Way:
In a meet where almost none of the track athletes who had byes into August’s World Championships contested their events, it was a nice surprise to see those in the field doing so. In the women’s hammer throw, Brooke Andersen continued to show her dominance over not just the U.S. but the world. Her 78.65m victory was only her fifth-farthest result of the year, but it just so happens that she owns places 1-5 on the 2023 performance list. In the women’s discus Val Allman had a similarly dominant day, she won the competition by over two meters with her sixth different performance this year that bests anyone else in the world. In the men’s shot put, Hayward Field darling Ryan Crouser continued his undefeated season and has thrown at least 22m in every competition since his season opener last year. And in the women’s pole vault, Katie Moon set a new world lead, showing she is rounding into form at just the right time after suffering a few losses earlier in the year. It also deserves mention that two spots behind Moon last night was 18-year-old high schooler Hana Moll, who vaulted a big personal best. Moll, who is short of the standard but well within the rankings quota, was one of two high schoolers to impress Sunday night. Native Oregonian Mia Brahe-Pedersen made her second final of the meet, achieving the feat in both the 100m and the 200m. Both teenagers have incredibly promising futures, and for Brahe-Pederson, lining up against the best in the country will certainly give her the experience she needs next year headed into... her senior year of high school.
Some U.S. Titles Come With World Leads:
Every athlete who made a team this weekend has larger goals of performing well come August at the World Championships, but they have 40 more days until they have to be competing in Budapest, so it was nice to see many of them put it all on the line to place in the top three, and as a result we got some incredible times. Although no one was doubting Rai Benjamin’s ability to win, it was a pleasant surprise to see him run the 5th-fastest 400m hurdles of all time after an injury-plagued spring. The meet record showed he is capable of going head to head with rival Karsten Warholm – who put up his own top-10 all-time performance earlier in the week – when the elusive gold medal is on the line. Similarly, Gabby Thomas hot-potatoed the 200m world lead throughout the night with Shericka Jackson back in Jamaica, with Thomas running 21.86 in the U.S. semifinal, then Jackson running 21.71 in her final. When all was said and done, Thomas had the fastest performance of the year so far with a 21.60, a time that no one besides Jackson has gone under in the past two years. The job of taking on the Jamaican sprint machine at Worlds now falls primarily to Thomas and Sha’Carri Richardson, and both women seem more than prepared for the effort.
Owen Corbett
Huge sports fan turned massive track nerd. Statistics major looking to work in sports research. University of Connecticut club runner (faster than Chris Chavez but slower than Kyle Merber).
