By Citius Mag Staff
December 17, 2025
By David Melly & Paul Snyder
This track and field season sure was a memorable one. Something about not having the whole season revolve around those five Olympic rings makes for an entertaining year, one where excitement isn’t quite as concentrated in August and athletes are more willing to step outside their comfort zone.
There weren’t an extraordinary number of world records set this year. Of the official outdoor championship events, only four marks went down, and all four were set by existing world record holders. Instead, the most memorable moments of 2025 weren’t about historic times; they were the product of rivalries, of experimentation, of upended expectations. When we look back on the Year That Was in track and field, here are a few memorable moments on the oval that stood out.
Push came to shove.
Given that all professional sports are entertainment products—track and field being no exception—let’s kick things off with something that took place on the track but that came after the race was over: that whole Noah Lyles/Kenny Bednarek thing. As a refresher, Lyles broke the tape in the men’s 200m at the U.S. Championships in 19.63, a half stride ahead of Bednarek in 19.67, stared him down, and maybe cut him off as they decelerated. Bednarek gave Lyles a shove because (maybe?) his path had been interrupted or (maybe?) as retribution for the aforementioned stare down.
Whatever the reason, Lyles then turned and stared down Bednarek a second time, only now, his arms were outstretched in a manner universally understood to mean “come at me bro.” Bednarek did not come at him, bro. But as NBC Sports’s YouTube video of the incident describes it, things were certainly TESTY. At least publicly, nothing much else came from the incident. Cryptic statements were given during interviews. Disrespect implied or outright alluded to. Rumors circulated that the origin of the beef stemmed from an anonymous track gossip Twitter page. By the time Worlds rolled around, all parties were claiming the hatchet was buried
But for one, brief, thrilling moment, the biggest headline in the sport was that two of the biggest names were beefing. Track and field has a reputation for its athletes being friendly and respectful, focused on camaraderie and individual excellence. That’s part of the draw for some fans. But for plenty of others, a little bit of bad blood raises the stakes and makes things far more interesting. We want to see people run fast—and there’s an element of excitement when you know it’s not just about medals… it’s personal.
The new guard faced off.
After last track season, it seemed clear that the athlete to beat in the women’s sprints was Olympic 100m champ Julien Alfred. At 23 years old, the St. Lucian was coming off a breakout season at the start of her physical prime, and for the first few months of the season, it seemed like she would continue to steamroll any and all competition in her way.
Enter Melissa Jefferson-Wooden. The Olympic bronze medalist had a huge year of her own in 2024, but she was largely overshadowed by the two fellow former NCAA champs ahead of her on the Paris podium, Alfred and MJW’s training partner Sha’Carri Richardson. She came out firing this spring, however, clocking a 100m/200m sweep at two of the three Grand Slam events. Her performance in Philadelphia was particularly notable because she not only ran a world-leading 10.73 in the 100m, she defeated Olympic champ Gabby Thomas in the 200m, generally considered her weaker event. At the same time, Alfred was doing the rounds on the European circuit, clocking a 10.7 of her own in cool weather in Sweden. Until the two met for the first time this season, it still felt like Alfred had the edge as she handily dispatched international Diamond League fields with what looked like 70% effort.
But at the Prefontaine classic on July 5, everything changed: Alfred and Jefferson-Wooden met head-to-head for the first time of the year, and the American got the better of her rival in a tight battle, 10.75 to 10.77. Before that meeting, Alfred was 4-0 against MJW head-to-head, and two months later, MJW proved Pre was no fluke with a decisive 10.61 victory in Tokyo. Now, we head into 2026 with the narrative flip-flopped: Both are huge stars running the fastest they’ve ever run, but now it’s Alfred chasing Jefferson-Wooden’s shadow and looking to get back on top.
Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone chased history—in a totally new event.
We’re truly lucky Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone got tired of breaking her own records in the hurdles, and even luckier she stuck with the flat 400m after things didn’t quite go her way in 2023.
It’s easy to remember the main takeaway from this year: SML ran 47.78, the second-fastest time in history and the fastest in 40 years. But for a good two-thirds of the season, it felt like once again Sydney’s chase of the American record would continue to be her white whale: In four races leading up to Worlds, she never ran faster than 48.90 after running 48.74 two seasons prior. But when the Tokyo semifinals rolled around, Sanya Richards-Ross was finally bumped off the top spot in the record books as Sydney cooked a ridiculous 48.29 before she even got to the final.
The true magic of Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone is that you know exactly what she’s going to do under the bright lights, and yet the results are still stunning. Yeah, she’s fast, we get it. A generational talent, a record-breaker. And yet, in that moment on the homestretch when she stopped the clock in 47 seconds for the first time in four decades, she still found a way to take our breaths away. Not since Usain Bolt has an athlete managed to bring a wow-factor to a predictable outcome over and over again, and like Bolt, Sydney has now done it in two different events.
Men’s distance results were Jimmy’d around.
The first men’s running final of the 2025 World Championships was the men’s 10,000m, and coming off of the 2024 Olympics—which saw a historically fast running of the event—expectations were high. The winner from Paris, Joshua Cheptegei was out focusing on the roads, so the gold medal looked up for grabs. Paris’s silver and bronze medalists, Berihu Aregawi and Grant Fisher, were back and presumptive favorites to do something similar in Tokyo. But beyond those two, plenty of other names popped off the entry list: Yomif Kejelcha, Mo Ahmed, Andreas Almgren, Thierry Ndikumwenayo, and plenty of others. One of those “and plenty of others” was the feisty Frenchman Jimmy Gressier, a perennial also-ran more known for his celebratory antics than any particular race result. And yet, off of a slow pace that kept the entire field in contention through the final lap, it was Gressier whose final gear was the fastest.
This race didn’t feel like the coronation of a new global leader—though Gressier may very well medal again on the world stage. It felt like the track and field Joker showing up to introduce a little anarchy. From the moment Gressier crossed the finish line until the conclusion of the global championships, unexpected outcomes prevailed across basically every men’s race above 800m. The Olympic 1500m champ gets DQ’d from that event but comes back to win the 5000m? Sure. The 1500m is won by a steady-performing but unheralded Portuguese athlete? Okay! The steeple goes to a hard-closing Kiwi who almost didn’t make the final after nearly having his face spiked off mid-tumble? Of course! A Tanzanian marathoner secures his nation’s first ever international athletics gold medal in a photo finish? Naturally. While results like this make pre-writing anything impossible, they’re undeniably more fun!
Mondo was Mondo.
As much as we love an unexpected slate of outcomes, sport does rely on stars to generate buzz. And right now, there is no brighter, nor more consistent star in our sport—or really, any sport—than Mondo Duplantis. Duplantis won Worlds (duh) and set a new world record there, to boot. He hasn’t lost a competition of any sort—and we are counting his 1-on-1 100m showdown with Karsten Warholm—since July of 2023. It’s hard to boil down Mondo’s season to any one moment, partially because he broke the world record four separate times. But the first and the last were particularly memorable. In his second competition of the year, he leapt 6.27m indoors in Clermont, France, on February 28, making it clear that he hadn’t slowed his roll any bit post-2024. And at Worlds, he officially took the event into a new stratosphere, clearing 6.30m. He’s now both the only man in history to clear 6.20m and 6.30m, and if that doesn’t show just how extraordinary an athlete Mondo is, what does?
Decades from now, these will be the performances that stick in our minds and get retold to the next generation. But some of the best moments of the year happened before the gun went off and after the dust had settled. Next week, we’ll look beyond the on-paper results and at the moments in 2025 where off-the-track antics and news got lips a-flapping and fans a-fighting.
Citius Mag Staff
