ON A COOL AND RAINY NIGHT during the first of two late summer Swiss DL stops, where five other Paris gold medalists tasted defeat, Masai Russell couldn’t quite add to her back-to-back major victories and pristine collection of 100H marks at 12.25 or better.
But the Lausanne runner-up finish to new 12.28 performer Nadine Visser in a downpour (12.45–12.53) did little to diminish the Olympic champion’s favorite status for next month’s WC, or negate her historically fast ’25. Like a fighter taking a blow but undeterred and ready for more, she quickly brushed it off. The main event awaits in Tokyo just under a month away.
“Yeah, I think the conditions… they are speaking for themselves, based off how I look,” she said, as she shivered under an umbrella during a post-race on-track interview in Lausanne. “But 2nd place, in this weather… It’s all about placing right now and as long as I’m in the top 3 and putting up good numbers, I’m not mad about it.
“I feel physically really good,” she added. “I just ran 12.19 [4] days ago, so I’m still kind of recovering from that. But yeah, other than that, the goal now is just to focus towards Tokyo and, yeah, come up with the win.”
You see, Russell is driven to disprove the notion that in today’s über-competitive women’s 100H landscape — where a run in the 12.3s in good conditions rarely wins (or even places) most of the time — that an athlete can stay on top for more than one championship. NBC commentator Ato Boldon has said, “Nobody gets to sit on the throne for more than a year” in the 100H and, since ’13, he’s right: 9 global championships, 7 different winners, none consecutive. Sally Pearson was the last to pull it off at the ’11 WC/’12 OG.
As Russell told T&FN’s Karen Rosen in February, “My goal is to keep people at my back and just to continue to win. A lot of people said that they didn’t think I could win the Olympics, so I’m going to show them that I want to win the World Championships and hold that throne again for another year.”
In ’24, Russell won the Trials and the Games, but T&FN ’s World Rankings panel could not find grounds to rate her any higher than No. 3 for the season because she didn’t have any other wins in more than a dozen races, including 5 DLs.
’25 is a different story. Yes, her slate isn’t flawless, but she has two huge victories and is blowing it up on the watch. Between her 12.17 AR in April (the Miramar Grand Slam) and her 12.19 DL record in Chorzów last week, Russell has run four times this year at 12.25 or better and five in ’24 and ’25 now, nearly a third of history’s 18 performances at that level. No other athlete owns more than a trio of such marks (3 each for WR-holder Tobi Amusan and former WR-holder Keni Harrison), and no one else has more than two in a season.
Russell’s five best marks now average 12.214, followed by Amusan (12.240), Harrison (12.246) and Yordanka Donkova (12.254), who held the WR before Harrison. All this with the backdrop of having come back from a serious ankle injury after Miramar and enduring some “messed up” travel before that 12.19.
The centerpiece of Russell’s season so far has been the USATF Champs, where she not only defended her ’24 title with a meet record 12.22, but added a 12.25 in the heats — just 0.01 off the fastest non-final ever.
“I’m becoming who I believe that I am,” she said then. “Hurdle queen, period.”
Russell clearly brings a fiery personality to the track, as she revealed in the Lausanne pre-meet presser, an alter ego of sorts. “I just don’t wanna lose, and I’m gonna do whatever it takes to get to the line first.”
It really all goes back to 2 years ago, her final season as a Kentucky Wildcat — but not the last with Coach Lonnie Greene, with whom she still trains in Lexington. When Russell broke through with her CR 12.36 (her PR was just 12.71 in ’22), her mantra, she told T&FN’s Jeff Hollobaugh then, was “Why not me?”
In the last 15 months, Russell has answered that question, and with much more to come.
