A FEW WEEKS AGO, I spoke with Khaleb McRae, the new World Indoor Record holder in the 400 and now the U.S. champion. He struck me as an athlete both sharp and driven, one who will be a force for years to come.
Something he said has really stuck with me. He talked about his burning desire to win a global outdoor gold and we touched on the long wait he will have to get to Beijing ’27 — a year-and-a-half from now.
McRae’s star is on the rise. I asked him, would it be tough to keep the focus, the motivation, the health going for that long?
“We still have the Ultimate Championships this year, so I feel like that’s something I could go win myself,” he said. “It might not be a major championship yet, but it’s definitely the championship I feel like everyone’s going to be at this year, so that’s what I’m gunning for now.”
Even longer, of course, will be the wait for him to go after an Olympic podium. McRae is gunning for that too, as is every pro athlete, along with a good sampling of current collegians and high schoolers.
Yet we’ve all seen the cruelty of the calendar and how it can strike athletes who have the best season of their lives in a year with no championships, who would have been remembered as legends if only the Olympics or the Worlds had been a year earlier. For the unlucky ones, injury or sickness hits at the worst time, or maybe it’s just that their training doesn’t yield the same returns as a season before. In either case, they don’t see the result they have dreamed about.
Perhaps it’s bad luck. Or, for the more dramatically inclined, perhaps it’s the classic Shakespearean curse of being punished by fate for daring to challenge the stars. Athletes can be “star-crossed” just as easily as lovers. My take is a simpler one: sometimes, that’s just how life goes.
A partial fix already happened four decades ago. I would mark the creation of the World Championships as the greatest achievement ever by our sport’s governing body. It went a long way toward filling the too-long gap between quadrennial Olympics and fittingly made immortal our memory of a host of athletes who never found Olympic glory.
The ’26 season is one of the “off” years with no global championships. It was planned this way all along, so that the Worlds didn’t step on the toes of long-established events such as the Commonwealth Games and European Championships — even though in recent years Euro Champs are also staged in Olympic seasons. Yet those two events in particular leave much of the world out.
The coming World Ultimate Championships that McRae is pointing for, while a fascinating experiment, will also be an exclusive affair, with small fields and a number of disciplines not on the menu.
Maybe, in the coming post-Coe era, it’s time for World Athletics to consider taking the final step and give us a full-throated World Championships in every non-Olympic year. Anyone who watched the Worlds last year in Tokyo would have little doubt after seeing the success and the enthusiasm generated in that effort. Most other pro sports, with the notable exception of soccer, host a global championship on an annual basis. Ours has the organizational and marketing capacity to do so as well. The recent stretch of 5 straight years of global championships (2021–25) amply proved that.
I believe it’s time, and that athletes like Khaleb McRae — as well as all of the sport’s fans — would absolutely love an annual feast of track & field. I know I would.
