Unlike “normal” global championship years, this professional season ended with three championships of a sort: the Diamond League final, World Ultimate Championships, and World Road Running Championships.

As its name implies, the “ultimate” championship feels like the closest thing we had this year to a be-all-end-all determination of who’s the best athlete in their respective events, but it’s easier to look at the calendar and suggest that success in other forays—whether it’s the European Championships, regular-season DL circuit, Commonwealth Games, or something else entirely—could mean the same or more than a trophy in Budapest.

That made sorting out our year-end power rankings all the more challenging. How do you account for a steeplechaser who didn’t have the option of competing at WUC? Or a sprinter who ran really well, but didn’t necessarily face the same competition as a U.S. championship? When we first took on this assignment in June, World Indoors was the single biggest event on the schedule you could point to as evidence of championship mettle, and spillover good vibes from 2025 were still in the air. That’s no longer true. 2025, and even this year’s indoor season, are both increasingly distant memories. What have you (the top 25 athletes on the track and in the field) done for us lately?

As always, there’s a healthy dose of subjectivity that goes into these rankings. How do you compare a single-event specialist against a more generalized sprinter or distance runner? How much does consistency over the regular season matter compared to winning when it “counts?” How much does the top-end talent of an event or event group like the women’s 800m or the men’s pole vault elevate a star who didn’t win all that much? How much should you weigh consistently beating a deep field of competition, like in the women’s 100m hurdles or men’s 100m?

Our team of semi-informed, highly-opinionated experts combed through meet results, world rankings, descending order lists, and our own 10,000 hours of track and field viewing to put together a definitive (until it gets torn apart in the comment section) list of the best track and field athletes of the season. They are:

Top 25 Track Athletes of 2026:

1. Masai Russell

2. Alison dos Santos

3. Melissa Jefferson-Wooden

4. Audrey Werro

5. Josh Kerr

6. Ja’Kobe Tharp

7. Collen Kebintashipi

8. Kenny Bednarek

9. Marileidy Paulino

10. Julien Alfred

11. Rai Benjamin

12. Emmanuel Wanyonyi

13. Oblique Seville

14. Klaudia Kazmierska

15. Georgia Hunter Bell

16. Cameron Myers

17. Jakob Ingebrigtsen

18. Faith Cherotich

19. Likina Amebaw

20. Keely Hodgkinson

21. Cooper Lutkenhaus

22. Emma Zapletalova

23. Gabby Thomas

24. Djamel Sedjati

25. Femke Bol

Top 25 Field Athletes of 2026:

1. Mondo Duplantis

2. Chase Jackson

3. Yan Ziyi

4. Rumesh Pathirage

5. Yaroslava Mahuchikh

6. Emmanouil Karalis

7. Jessica Schilder

8. Andy Diaz Hernandez

9. Valarie Sion

10. Miltiadis Tentoglou

11. Ethan Katzberg

12. Eleanor Patterson

13. Sally Sarr

14. Hana Moll

15. Camryn Rogers

16. Tara Davis-Woodhall

17. Sandi Morris

18. Gianmarco Tamberi

19. Kristjan Ceh

20. Rajindra Campbell

21. Sarah Mitton

22. Larissa Iapichino

23. Nicola Olyslagers

24. Leo Fabbri

25. Haruka Kitaguchi

Congratulations in particular to the great Masai Russell, who took issue with her #12 mid-year ranking and proceeded to break the world record, win WUC, and cap an undefeated season just to prove us wrong. And while he had to fend off a few strong challenges from the ascendent Manolo Karalis, Mondo Duplantis has leapt high enough, often enough to retain his #1 overall ranking in the field events. The competition was so fierce this year that poor Ja’Kobe Tharp was able to break the world record in the 110m hurdles but not crack the top 5, and Marileidy Paulino finished the year ranked 9th despite completing an undefeated season in the 400m. That’s not to say that they didn’t reach consistently high heights worthy of praise all season, just that others soared even higher.

The unusual nature of the 2026 season not only makes it more complicated to wrap up the year in a tidy bow; it changes how we think about what constitutes excellence. Take an athlete like javelin wunderkind Yan Ziyi: she won five of her six competitions this year, all Diamond Leagues, including a world junior record of 71.74m and the Diamond League final. At 18 years old, she’s now the second farthest thrower of all time. Her sole blemish is that she finished second in the World Ultimate Championships to a surprise three-meter season’s best from Haruka Kitaguchi. Does Kitaguchi’s one big throw outweigh Yan’s year of dominance? This year, we say no. But would it make a difference if that throw came in the Olympic final versus a World Ultimate Championship? That’s a slightly tougher question.

Power rankings are, as always, excellent fodder for debate. Feel free to take on and tear apart our hierarchy on long runs with your friends or at dinner after practice, keeping the 2026 season alive for a few more weeks as we digest and reflect on everything that happened. We can’t wait to hear what you think!

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