Would you rather win a race or run a personal best?

Or better yet… would you rather your favorite athlete win a race or run their personal best?

How you answer serves as something of a litmus test for whether or not a meet matters. If the only takeaway from a race is the time, then really you could hold it anywhere. The history and stakes of any particular event are rendered meaningless in an ongoing swirl of trackflation and stepping-stone qualification.

The 2026 Diamond League season was fantastic and packed full of exciting moments. But with World Athletics’s current point structure and ranking system in place, the DL circuit—even its crowning event, the Memorial Van Damme—every stop along the way is the equivalent of a regular season baseball game: a good place to eat a hot dog, but also acceptable to leave in the top of the 8th inning to beat traffic.

For a meet that turns 50 years old next year, it doesn’t feel like “Memorial Van Damme champion” really holds any particular significance outside Belgium in the wider track world. And if it does, it’s very hard to say with certainty whether it means more to win in Brussels, or Rome, or Xiamen when the races so often play out the same way.

Watching somebody run fast is exciting, but it’s not quite the same as sitting on the edge of your seat, totally unsure about what’s going to happen next. It’s the removal of certain varieties of strategy and gamesmanship to make an already simple sport even simpler, all in the interest of goading the field into running a little quicker. (Because DL meets are ultimately competing against one another to see how often they can trot out that cardboard “MEETING RECORD” sign.)

And this is not a diatribe against rabbits at-large because. There’s plenty of value to having them in the case of Audrey Werro’s 1:53.70 or Josh Kerr’s world record. But over the last three years, across the 800m, 1500m, 5000m, and 3000m steeplechase, there have been just two world leads set at the Diamond League final. That’s an 8% success rate—hardly enough success from the herd to justify keeping the rabbits around.

Of course, if the rabbits are removed then whose fault would it be if a race is a total stinker? They’re always the easy scapegoats! In fact, rabbits screw up so often that we relish in and celebrate the occasion when one actually adds value. Again… not a great reason to continue employing rabbits at the final.

There are 14 other Diamond League meets throughout the season at which we can learn who is the best at running pace. Can we spare just one to see who is the best at racing? It gets repetitive!

What it all comes down to, ultimately, is whether Memorial Van Damme is the Diamond League Final or just the final Diamond League. The organizers seem determined to frame this particular meet as a championship of sorts, given that competitors have to qualify via regular-season points and receive extra prize money. But unlike every other championship race, there’s no championship-style racing, which only furthers to muddy the waters of what kind of spot the Brussels DL takes in the larger narrative.

World Athletics’s quest to provide something different could also work backward: instead of making new things novel, what if we tried to make our existing products a little less same-y? Taking rabbits out of the Diamond League final is an easy, no-cost (actually money-saving!) step toward differentiation of a season that can feel repetitive, and the net result is that it makes winning feel like winning.

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