“ACTUALLY, I’M REALLY GLAD that you asked about that. I’ve been thinking about that a lot.”
One might be inclined, with 20-year-old hurdle sensation Bradley Franklin, to begin with his dramatic 13.00 PR in July’s USATF 110H final, where he came within 0.004 (12.993 to 12.997) of defeating world champ Cordell Tinch. But he’s pleased to first expound upon his previous best of 13.04 from the day’s first round, the breakthrough before the breakthrough.
Franklin had thrice run between 13.07 and 13.10 in ’26 — all wind-aided — once at Tom Jones in April, twice in the Murphey Classic semi and final in July . But his initial effort at Icahn came with a legal 1.4 and lowered his PR from the 13.19 he had run for 5th at the NCAA.
“I was sort of relieved on two different fronts,” he continues, “the first being the day before the meet, I started feeling a bit of tension and pain in my hamstring and worried I wasn’t going to be able to run, let alone 13.04. The second is, yeah, I was finally able to run a 13.0, wind-legal.”
Of course, the ensuing final was one of the event’s great finishes, punctuated by the reactions of the principals after crossing the line: Tinch’s knowing grin, realizing he’d gotten by Franklin before the result was revealed, countered by the countenance of the latter, looking like someone who’d had something (victory) in his grasp, only for it to slip away.
But that’s not what was on his mind. “I was less concerned about my placement and more about… getting sub-13 because if I had done that, I would have become the youngest ever to run sub-13 over 42-inch hurdles, which would have been a really nice accolade,” he says. “I knew I was probably gonna get 2nd because Cordell’s just more experienced.”
One might think that, well, then Franklin, who turned 20 the day before (July 25), is still the youngest to run 13-flat or better. But no, Cuba’s Dayron Robles hit 13.00 in ’06, 2 months shy of his 20th birthday.
Franklin will have another shot, though, to get into the 12s this summer. He and Samford coach Rod Tiffin decided to add one more chapter to his campaign as he’ll line up August 30 at the Grand Prix Brescia in Italy.
In a historic year over the sticks, Franklin has been one of the more unlikely stars. Yes, he had a strong frosh campaign at Samford in ’25, with his 42-inch PR of 13.43 coming close to his 39-inch best (13.37) from prep days. That followed a PR-at-the-time 7.60 for 60H indoors.
As a soph this year, Franklin was still running around 7.6 indoors, with a 7.56 PR from mid-February, when his conference meet rolled around. He blasted a 7.45 in his prelim, then a 7.41 in the final. This shot him suddenly from an NCAA finalist contender to a serious medal threat.
Franklin concurs that was probably his most significant breakthrough. “When it happened, I was in genuine disbelief. My teammates in the stands were looking at me and motioning 7.45 and I was like, ‘That can’t be right.’
“Then I saw it actually pop up on the board, and I popped off because I had just realized that I had run a time that quick, and it wasn’t something that I even thought was close. I thought maybe my peak of the season might be 7.49. So to run 7.45, almost an entire-10th PR, was massive for me.
“And then the final, I really did want to get 7.39, but still, 7.41, gave me not only an NCAA lead but made me at the time the third-fastest hurdler in NCAA history, which was really, really great.”
Franklin says one of the biggest keys to making that sudden jump had come earlier that week. “I was messing around with my start, and I just figured out the correct position to properly project myself forward, because usually when I was starting, I would stand up pretty quickly, like just go straight from my set position to sort of a standing-up position.
“But I figured out how to have a bit of a drive phase, and that start was able to just carry my momentum through the entire race. I took a chance by implementing that into the races at Conference, and it ended up working out incredibly well.”
Franklin, who placed 2nd at the NCAA Indoor in March, added that Grant Holloway has been another inspiration, noting that his own physical makeup is similar to the Olympic champ and that led him to examine his style. “We both have a lot more leg in proportion to our torso,” he says. “Watching his races, I saw that he had a start where both of his knees were down. I started to implement that into my own race, and it significantly helped my start because it allowed me to push out even more while still having more space for my legs.”
He also gives “Coach T” a lot of credit. “He has spent this entire summer with me helping me to improve my form, my general speed, just every aspect of my hurdle race, and I really think I could not have done it without him.”
In addition to the 13.37, Franklin was a 7.61 indoor performer, and New Balance Indoor champ, as a prep at Thompson (Alabaster, Alabama), just south of Birmingham, in ’24. Some might be surprised he chose nearby Samford instead of a Power 4 school. But becoming a Bulldog appealed to him for several reasons, not the least of which was the fact that his father Byron, who starred in both football and track at Auburn before a career in the NFL, is the Associate AD for Development there.
Samford has frequently won the Southern Conference during Tiffin’s 20-year tenure. But it was one of the school’s academic options that was the ultimate selling point for Franklin. When Tiffin recruited him, he made the jaw-dropping discovery that Samford offered a Bachelor of Science in Game Design & 3D Animation. “Once I saw that major that pertained exactly to my interests, I thought, ‘OK, this is literally being handed to me on a platter. It would be a little dumb not to take it.’”
As Franklin has authored his PR-smashing performances this year, he has taken note of the excellence around him, whether it was Ja’Kobe Tharp blasting his WR 12.75 in the NCAA semis, immediately prior to his own, the across-the-board rewriting of all-time lists this year, or even the blitz of PRs behind Tharp and Kendrick Smallwood in Eugene.
“There were a lot of PRs throughout the meet. I think with Ja’Kobe running that 12.75, it kind of caused sort of a Bannister effect,” he said, name-checking history’s first sub-4:00 miler 72 years ago. “A lot of people realized, ‘OK, if he can do that, there’s no telling what I’m capable of,’ so everybody else just started running faster as well.”
Franklin knows his track history. Now he’s making his own.
