Trayvon Bromell has re-entered the chat.

A few weeks ago, we pondered what was going on with the women’s 100m this season. Since then, Melissa Jefferson-Wooden got a fast track and a legal wind in her third Grand Slam effort, and came away with a world-leading 10.73. There’s not much else of note to report from the Jamaican veterans or Jefferson-Wooden’s training partner, Sha’Carri Richardson. So right now, it’s looking more and more like the Olympic bronze medalist is now the woman to beat… until Julien Alfred finally opens up in her signature event.

This time last month, the men weren’t telling nearly as interesting a story. Noah Lyles was a mainstay on the podcasting circuit but not the track. Kenny Bednarek was dominating Grand Slam Track. And Akani Simbine was winning Diamond League races on the other side of the globe.

Fast forward to this past weekend, and all that was still true. But a few youngsters have registered significant blips on the radar, like 19-year-old South African Bayanda Walaza and collegians Abdul-Rasheed Saminu of Ghana and South Florida and American Jordan Anthony of Arkansas. Those two are set up for an epic clash at NCAAs this weekend, and on Hayward Field’s historically fast track for sprints, Christian Coleman’s 9.82 collegiate record could be in jeopardy.

All the while, a tectonic shift had already begun. We just hadn’t realized it yet. On May 24, two-time Olympian Trayvon Bromell ran his first 100m of the season at the PURE Athletics Invitational, winning his heat in 9.91 and skipping out on the final. For the 29-year-old who won his first global medal in Beijing in 2015, it was his first sub-10 since 2022, and just 0.01 off Simbine’s then-world lead of 9.90.

Two weeks later, Trayvon took his talents to Italy. The Golden Gala in Rome lined him up alongside Fred Kerley, Courtney Lindsey, and Ferdinand Omanyala, to name a few, and all of a sudden Bromell was back in the deep end of international competition after only racing Stateside all winter and spring. Would the bright lights of the Diamond League expose Bromell’s early-season performance as fraudulent?

Quite the opposite, in fact. Within a second of the gun going off, Bromell had put a step on Kerley, instantly reminding viewers why he’s a former World Indoor champ over 60 meters. By halfway, he was opening up a gap on the entire field and even had a comfortable enough margin to ease up over the finish line. It was an utterly dominant performance over world-class competition, and it looked easy.

Then the time popped up: 9.84 seconds (with a sizable but legit 1.1 tailwind). In an instant, Bromell wasn’t just back; he was the world leader, running his fastest time since the semifinals of USAs three years prior and looking every inch the generational talent New Balance saw when they signed him a decade earlier. Bromell has had more than his fair share of injuries, including multiple surgeries and torn Achilles-es, but when he’s healthy, he’s the sixth-fastest man in history, owns two World medals, and is ultimately the grown-up version of the first junior in history to break 10 seconds in the 100m.

Of course, Bromell isn’t going to walk to a gold medal in Tokyo just because he ran a strong race in Rome in June. Two days later, Olympic silver medalist Kishane Thompson won the Racers Grand Prix in his home nation of Jamaica in 9.88, his fastest time of the year so far and his second straight win. Visually, Thompson is the polar opposite of Bromell, all power and push to Bromell’s tip-toeing grace. But they have a lot in common: they’re both strong starters who don’t bother much with the 200m, and they’re both prodigious young talents whose biggest enemy has historically been the fragility of their own bodies.

As the calendar flips to June, we’re starting to see on the men’s side what we’d hoped to see on the women’s: the late debutants are coming around, and all of a sudden, the field feels a lot more crowded. And the farther we get into summer, the more unavoidable head-to-head clashes will become.

Either Simbine’s win streak (currently at six races) will come to an end, or he’ll continue racking up bigger and better victories as he bulldozes over the rest of the Diamond League circuit. Even if Thompson never races outside Jamaica for the rest of the summer, he can’t turn his silver medal from Paris into Tokyo gold without going through four American rivals first. And, quite simply, Bromell will need to manage to stay healthy in September, where he will meet Bednerek head-to-head for the first time since the final in 2022—assuming they don’t face off elsewhere first.

The best part of these exciting developments is that they’re the result of more and more athletes running well; we’re not achieving parity via setbacks and underperformances. We like to see our favorite athletes race fast, race often, and race their rivals, and if the men’s 100m continues on its current trajectory, we’re set up for plenty more of all three during a very exciting summer.

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