YOU MIGHT HAVE BEEN SURPRISED, while watching her win the silver medal in the Tokyo World Champs 400H, if you knew that Jasmine Jones had been training for and competing in the event at the elite level for less than two years. That she didn’t even break 56 until May ’24. That she previously “hated the idea of running a 400 in any capacity.”
In fact, when she finished 4th in the Paris Olympics it was part of a stunning sequence of four finals where Jones improved her 56.17 PR to 53.87, 53.15, 52.77 and then finally 52.29 — trailing only Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone, former USC teammate Anna Cockrell and Femke Bol.
Then in Tokyo, with McLaughlin-Levrone focusing on the flat 400, Jones capped her short, but sweet ’25 season by beating Cockrell for the first time and finishing 2nd to Bol with her new PR 52.08. All this after four years — final two of high school and first two at USC — of racing only sprint hurdles.
So how did we get here?
“My 100 hurdling was feeling a little stagnant, like I was stuck in a rut and it was hard to get down those tiny bits of seconds,” she recalls of a ’22 where she was NCAA runner-up in 12.66.
Jones was “waiting for a big drop” to that super-elite level of 12.4 or better, but feeling like she was “consistently having the same hamstring injuries” and perhaps was reaching her ceiling. “Maybe everything was telling me that this event and I don’t get along as well as I thought.”
Jones had also observed how Cockrell swept the hurdles at ’21 NCAAs, then made the Olympic 400H team and the final. “Watching how she was able to navigate both hurdles, and then eventually, kind of funnel [them] into one, was a huge inspiration. It gave me the idea that I should go back to 400H because I felt like, just as a girl who’s almost 6-feet tall and has a history in the event, there was more room for growth there.”
Wait — go back to 400 hurdles?
Has a history in the event?
Yes, dig deeper into Jones’ résumé and you see that she was once a shining star in the longer barrier events. The USATF JO age 15-16 champ at 400H in ’16 (while still 14) in 61.21, she then defended her title after her 9th-grade season at Greater Atlanta Christian, at 60.67. Meanwhile, she won a Georgia 300H state title (42.97), then repeated in ’18 as a soph (41.81).
However, after that summer 8 years ago, where she did not improve her 400H, but ran 13.74 for 100H, Jones closed the door on the longer race.
“I think when I started getting recruited for track, I had a little bit of a choice,” Jones says. “OK, I’m a hurdler, but which event do I really want to do, and which path can I direct myself and get coached into becoming a better athlete? And I chose 100H, because at the time I hated the idea of running a 400 in any capacity.”
The memory makes her laugh. “I hated the 4×4. Hated the 400H, kind of, and even 300H was a stretch.”
Jones gravitated toward prioritizing the 100s, wanting to stay competitive with current peers and anticipating new ones. She says the 100 hurdlers “were more of… a hot topic at the time, a competitive moment. It was fun getting that time as low as possible.” Indeed, Jones had gotten down to 13.19 in the 100H as a prep in ’19, winning the Pan-Am U20 title, before COVID ended her senior season in ’20.
“Then going to USC, I got to train with Anna and Mecca McGlaston and it was just a legacy of 100-meter hurdlers, so seeing that sort of path definitely directed me, so I could just train with them every day.” With her focus squarely on the shorter race her first two years as a Trojan in ’21 and ’22, she lowered her times to 12.89 and then 12.66, while finishing 2nd at the NCAA in the latter season.
But as Jones got ready for ’23, those doubts and questions began to gnaw at her. Even so, one might think, given her expressed disdain for longer races, that any impetus to move up might have come from her coach, Joanna Hayes.
“Weirdly, it was my idea,” she laughs. “So I went to her and I was like, ‘Hey, this is kind of crazy, but what do you think about me possibly trying 400H again?’
“And when she heard that, she was so excited! She was like, ‘Oh my God, I’ve been waiting for you to say that!’ Then she took the idea and ran with it, coached the heck out of it, and we came up with a plan for 2024 to have that be the thing that takes off.”
Hayes, nobody doubts, knows the hurdles. The ’04 Olympic gold medalist in the 100H, she coaches men’s Olympic and world champion Rai Benjamin in the around-the-track version.
It didn’t take off right away, though. First, Jones had to struggle through an injury-plagued ’23, which began with off-and-on hamstring issues, then ground to a halt with a case of plantar fasciitis that started as “random” foot pain and snowballed to something that lasted 6 months. “It made training and even putting on spikes at all really just tough and painful.” She did not compete after mid-April.
So ’24 dawned with her final indoor season at USC, then a modest series of outdoor races before the big breakthrough happened, crushing her 56.17 PR all the way down to 53.87. It wasn’t however, quite as dramatic a revelation as it might have seemed.
‘We kind of knew that 56 wasn’t the real time that I could run, because every time I ran that — which was, weirdly, many times — there was always something egregiously wrong with the race. And we were just, ‘OK, well, if we can run 56 with some crazy trip-ups and incorrect step patterns then I’m sure if we get it right, we can just drop a couple seconds at once.’”
The Pac-12 was where it happened, that combination of focus and still being relaxed. “We both had a lot of faith that 400H was an event that I could be successful in. So when I did that and saw 53 seconds, we finally got a mark of where I’m really at. I expected, 54-ish, so 53.87 was a nice surprise.”
The rest of ’24 for Jones was a well-documented whirlwind of NCAAs (53.15 Collegiate Record at the time), the Trials (52.77) and the Games (52.29), as well as signing with adidas and Global Athletics to launch her pro career. “It was an amazing several weeks where my coach and I really just looked at each other and we were so proud of the work that we’d done. All this amazing stuff that I was able to accomplish that year with her help.”
As for ’25 and her World finale? “It felt like the whole past year from Paris to Tokyo had kind of blown by in a second, and I was right back where I was, but this time I had much more experience,” she said. “I felt like I was in better shape physically. I didn’t have any lingering injuries from the college season, and I felt much fresher and much more hungry at this point. Tokyo was kind of my second chance. I felt like I had confidence, and I really wanted to win.
“As soon as I crossed the line, I knew I had a medal, so I was so excited. The first person I saw when I crossed was [training partner] Rai, so he gave me a huge hug… then they handed me the flag and the medal, and it was just like a full-circle moment.”
2026, with neither McLaughlin-Levrone (pregnancy) nor Bol (move to 800) to contend with, is “wide open,” Jones acknowledges, while also a welcome break.
“Setting goals, has been a little bit more challenging and a little bit more abstract. Seeing all the news has been super exciting and super motivating to kind of stay locked in and stay in it, but having this time to kind of readjust my paradigm and reset and recenter before the next two important years has been nice.”
