We’ve gone over this countless times: there’s too much track; there are too many meets; and there are often too many events at those meets. And yet, here we are, standing out in the metaphorical pouring rain holding a bouquet of roses, asking more international athletes to race the 60 meter dash.

That’s because holding the occasional early-season, outdoor 60m as an exhibition-style race may actually be good for the sport. From an athlete’s perspective, it’s good for speed development and working on response time out of the blocks. From the fan perspective, it creates a somewhat-legit frame of comparison for top athletes on different continents who may not face off head-to-head for months. But the reason this shorter event benefits the sport on a larger scale is its narrative-building benefits.

During the offseason, track fans can—rightfully—assume that their favorite athletes are putting in the work. The most transparent of distance runners will share their Strava workouts (like this particularly insane Clayton Young effort), and we all love an update on Ryan Crouser’s latest feat of Herculean strength, but for many sprinters, the work goes unseen. This is an issue that historically also plagued sports with larger television audiences: it’s tough to give fans something to clamor over when there is no real product on display in the offseason or during bye weeks. The stuff happening behind closed doors isn’t always terribly interesting, and athletes prefer to keep their preparation and recovery protocols somewhat private anyway.

Enter a phenomenon borne of social media: a virtual peek “in the lab.” You’ve undoubtedly seen them. A crisply-edited video depicting an athlete having vastly improved an existing skill or developed a new one entirely. The existence of an “in the lab” post hardly means the posting athlete has actually leveled up, but it gets the conversation going. And there’s nothing sports fans love more than making a SportsCenter-split-screen, screaming-argument-at-the-bar mountain of a debate out of a molehill during the quiet parts of the sports season.

Track and field does not always lend itself to easily digestible “in the lab” moments. For the real technicians, watching Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone working through some lead leg challenges or Yulimar Rojas drilling through the second phase of her triple jumps can be very enlightening. But racing “off” or “weird” distances brings a slightly more casual viewer in on that phenomenon—the shortness of the 60m essentially means it is a pure display of an athlete’s start, drive phase, and acceleration.

Let’s not forget what last year’s World Indoor 60m finals told us about the future of the season. Noah Lyles taking world indoor record holder Christian Coleman to the line (for the second time that winter) was a definitive sign he’d shed his “terrible starter, only good at the 200m” narrative, and Julien Alfred picked up her first global medal (a gold one). Later that summer, they became your Olympic champions.

Now, participation in the indoor 60m on the pro circuit is just part of the job. That’s no longer a development play, but an actual competitive pursuit. But when it takes place outdoors? Ooh buddy. That’s an athlete “in the lab,” refining a few things in public but in a silly, low-stakes way.

Down in Jamaica, where even in the winter the days remain—relatively—long, so too does the track. Meaning they aren’t fussing with short indoor track. Hell, there isn’t even an indoor track anywhere in the country! But that doesn’t mean there aren’t opportunities for Jamaica’s star sprinters to remain in-country while dropping down further in distance from 100m dash. Kishane Thompson opened up his 2025 racing schedule a couple of weeks back with a 6.48 outdoor 60m showing. He’s since run the distance indoors, using our “in the lab” theory, one can surmise that Thompson is doubling down on his strengths as a 100m man.