Budapest—The 2023 World Athletics Championships ended last night with the United States topping the medal table, a sentence that could be copy-pasted from any year since the invention of the stopwatch. Yet beneath the predictable Stars-and-Stripes soundtrack, the nine-day meet served as a handy geopolitical EKG: rising heart rates in East Africa, arrhythmic blips in…
**Track, Field, and the Theater of National Dreams** *Dispatch from the cheap seats of the World Athletics Championships* By the time the 4×400-meter relay limped across the finish line in Budapest last August, the scoreboard read like a UN roll-call written by someone with a grudge: USA 12 golds, Spain 1, India 0 but a…
Zharnel Hughes and the Peculiar Glory of Running Very Fast While the Planet Burns The last time a British man won the 100 metres at the World Athletics Championships, the Berlin Wall was still collecting graffiti and nobody had yet invented the phrase “influencer.” Thirty-six years later, Zharnel Hughes—Anguillan passport, British vest, Texan training base—has…
Tokyo, 2025 – The World Athletics Championships have returned, this time to a city that already hosted an Olympics nobody was allowed to attend. The symbolism is hard to miss: 2,000 elite athletes will once again perform for an audience of empty seats, cardboard cut-outs, and the world’s most expensive television contracts. Welcome to the…
