The Oregon Ducks weren’t the only athletes playing to a home crowd this weekend. At the Bislett Games and Bauhaus-Galan, two Diamond League meets in Oslo and Stockholm, respectively, packed stadiums of athletics fans showed up for evenings of quality track and field—headlined, of course, by the comparatively-small countries’ biggest stars.

In Norway, Jakob Ingebrigtsen’s ongoing injury woes put even more of a spotlight on Viking hurdler Karsten Warholm and his oft-vanishing shirt. The meet ended with a 300-meter showdown between the three best long hurdlers in history, and Warholm didn’t send his fan base home disappointed. After hitting the homestretch more or less even with Olympic champ Rai Benjamin, he hit the turbo-jets after the last hurdle to decisively take home the victory in 32.67, a “world record” in the rarely-contested distance, and only sub-33 second performance in history.

After suffering the slight indignity of losing to Alison dos Santos by 0.07 seconds in front of the home crowd last year, Warholm clearly didn’t want to leave any room for doubt this time around. And he paid the price three days later, when he finished a well-beaten third behind his rivals in Stockholm over 400mH. Rather than provide clarity on the 2025 pecking order, Benjamin’s meet-record 46.54 and dos Santos’s 46.68 primarily demonstrated just how far ahead of the rest of the world these three guys are—now, and at any point in history. The top 20(!) 400m hurdles in history have all been produced by these three guys, as well as 31 of the 33 sub-47 performances ever run.

If you’re a Swedish athletics fan, however, Sunday’s 400mH clash may have felt like a bit of an afterthought. That’s because, a few minutes earlier, Bauhaus-Galan successfully set up and executed a showcase for two of its brightest stars to shine brighter than ever before. On the oval, 30-year-old Swede Andreas Almgren and a group of pacers took a daring crack at Mo Katir’s European record of 12:45.01, and despite doing much of the late racing solo, Almgren came away with a six-second PB and a shiny new 12:44.27 personal best. 

Almgren is the kind of guy that’s had a consistent but largely unremarkable pro career for the better part of a decade, stretching from a World junior bronze over 800m in 2014 to four different fourth-place finishes at European championships over the years, so this was the perfect stage for a long-awaited breakout. And given that the guy who’s record he broke is currently serving a WADA ban for whereabouts violations, he likely had far more than just the Swedish faithful cheering him on for this one.

Despite Almgren’s heroics, however, any conversation that includes both “record setting” and “Swedish track and field” begins and ends, of course, with Mondo Duplantis. It’s understandable to become a bit calloused to Duplantis setting and re-setting his own world record, but watching it live—on TV or in-stadium—is a thrilling experience nevertheless. Duplantis’s first-attempt clearance of 6.28 meters (that’s 20 feet, 7.25 inches for you Imperialists) sent the crowd into a frenzy, and for good reason: while that was Mondo’s twelfth time raising the bar to unprecedented heights, it was his first WR set in Sweden.

Building a whole meet around one or two hometown heroes is a high-stakes proposition: it puts a ton of pressure on one or two stars to define success or failure of the whole endeavor, and it can suck up all the air in the room at the expense of other worthy performances. Had Mondo bowed out at 6.00m or Almgren run 12:46, the meet would’ve still been a highly-entertaining affair, but more than a few fans would’ve filed out of the stands wanting more. So while we’ve become accustomed to stars like Duplantis and Warholm who can perform greatness on command, we can’t take for granted just how remarkable it is to deliver when you’re hauling the weight of an entire nation’s expectations around the track.

International fans tuning in had plenty else to cheer for, however. In a perverse way, it feels fitting for Julien Alfred’s 10.87/10.75 double 100m win across Oslo and Sweden to become a bit of an afterthought. Not because they weren’t each incredible, dominant performances from the Olympic champion. But because Alfred is so reliable—and so low-key a personality—that it felt a bit inevitable that when the St. Lucian finally returned to her signature event for the first time this season, she’d absolutely trounce any field she faced. Alfred’s 10.75 at Bauhaus-Galan will surely evoke comparisons to Melissa Jefferson-Wooden’s 10.73 in Philadelphia, increasing the hype for their eventual showdown, but the way she’s executing right now, MJW feels like the underdog despite her faster season’s best.

Now, some of our more America-centric readers are surely throwing their phones and/or laptops across the room in anger because we’ve gotten this far into our Diamond League analysis without mentioning Nico Young. And their outrage would be justified, because the 22-year-old Mike Smith disciple raced with a discipline and maturity well beyond his age and nascent pro career would suggest, turning what was initially billed as a 5000m world record attempt in Oslo into a coming-out party (no pun intended) for a new American distance star on the world stage.

Young outdueled Yomif Kejelcha and a whole slew of faster-on-paper, more experienced runners to take the win in 12:45.27, an American outdoor record and the second-fastest mark of all time behind Grant Fisher’s 12:44.09 indoor mark. It’s a crazy indicator of just how good U.S. men’s distance running has gotten that Graham Blanks’s 12:48.20 and Cooper Teare’s 12:57.05 get relegated to “also rans,” although Blanks in particular deserves a huge amount of credit for jumping in the Diamond League deep end in his first pro season and not completely drawing.

Speaking of successful newbies, NCAA indoor champion-turned-On-pro Bella Whittaker has spent the better part of the spring proving that Virginia Beach was no fluke, picking up two Diamond League 400m wins in 49.58 and 49.78. These were no watered-down fields, either: Whittaker successfully beat Norwegian record holder Henriette Jaeger, World Indoor champ Amber Anning, Dutch relay stalwart Lieke Klaver, and two-time World medalist Sada Williams twice in four days. And while she’s the exact opposite of a newbie, we can’t forget to mention Dalilah Muhammad, who’s having a swan song for the ages in her final pro season.

Muhammad set the age-35 world record in the 400m hurdles and took Femke Bol hurdle-for-hurdle through 300+ meters in Stockholm, running 52.91 to break 53 seconds for the first time in nearly four years. Clearly racing with nothing to lose is working out for Muhammad and it would be great to see her ride off into the sunset with one last U.S. team—or even a medal.

Next up on the Diamond League circuit, a stop in Paris. Entries are being slowly released, and while there likely won’t be the same level of home-country heroics as the last two meets, steeplechaser Alice Finot and 1500m runner Agathe Guillemot will probably get an extra boost from their fan bases. Jimmy Gressier will try to represent the home colors with a win in the 5000m… but he’ll have to go through Nico Young to do it. And Gabriel Tual has the fastest PB in a stacked 800m field, but Tshepiso Masalela and Bryce Hoppel won’t just hand him the victory for the sake of a feel-good story.