USA
2026

January, on Home Grass

The season opened with a world championship on American soil. On 10 January 2026, Apalachee Regional Park in Tallahassee staged the 46th World Athletics Cross Country Championships — 485 athletes from 52 nations, and the first time the event had been run in the United States since Boston in 1992, thirty-four years earlier.

The host team's results were modest, and this page is not going to dress them up. The best American in the senior men's race was Parker Wolfe, twelfth in 29:28, a minute and ten seconds behind Jacob Kiplimo's 28:18 — the Ugandan's third consecutive title. Agnes Ngetich of Kenya won the women's race in 31:28. The mixed relay came fifth. The one American podium of the day belonged to the under-20 men, whose 75 points took the team bronze.

Hosting was the story, and it was not a small one: World Athletics had not brought its oldest championship to the country that stages more elite cross country than almost any other in three decades. The grass, the mud pit and the Florida sun did the rest.

Top of the Table in Toruń

In March the indoor worlds went the other way entirely. At the World Indoor Championships in Toruń, Poland — 674 athletes, 118 federations, 20–22 March — the United States topped the medal table with 18 medals: five gold, seven silver, six bronze. No other team reached double figures; Great Britain was second on the table with four medals, all of them gold.

The five titles tell their own story. Jordan Anthony took the 60 metres in a world-leading 6.41. Chase Jackson won the shot put with 20.14. Both 4×400 relays delivered — the men in a championship-record 3:01.52, the women in 3:25.81 with Bailey Lear, Rosey Effiong, Paris Peoples and Shamier Little.

And then there was the 800 metres. Cooper Lutkenhaus won it in 1:44.24 at seventeen years old — the youngest world indoor champion in the history of the event. Four months later he would run 1:43.48 to win the national outdoor title, still seventeen.

June in Eugene, July in New York

The loudest single result of the American year came at a college meet. On 10 June 2026, in the semifinals of the NCAA Outdoor Championships at Hayward Field in Eugene, Ja'Kobe Tharp of Auburn — twenty years old, from Murfreesboro, Tennessee — ran the 110 metres hurdles in 12.75. Aries Merritt's world record of 12.80 had survived since September 2012; no one had broken a world record at the NCAA championships since Dwight Stones cleared a high jump bar in 1976. The mark is still going through World Athletics' ratification process, and this page will say so until it is done.

The national championships moved to Icahn Stadium in New York, closing on 26 July. Noah Lyles won his third 100 m title in 9.79, the fastest time in the world this year and a match for the personal best from his Olympic final in Paris. Sha'Carri Richardson took the women's 100 in a season's best 10.77, and Melissa Jefferson-Wooden made it back-to-back 200 m titles in 21.69. The 110 hurdles final — without Tharp's name on the winning line — went to Cordell Tinch over Bradley Franklin by four thousandths of a second, 12.993 to 12.997.

What 2026 does not have is an outdoor world championships: after the sixteen-gold Tokyo year of 2025, the global outdoor calendar moved to the first World Athletics Ultimate Championship, scheduled for Budapest on 11–13 September — after the cut-off date of this page, which is why you will not read a word of prediction about it here.

From this season · in the archiveNike USA Team Pro Elite 2026 Women Storm Fit JacketNike USA women's Storm Fit jacket marked for 2026 — team-issue outerwear from the season on this page, and the first 2026 piece to reach the USA rail.240,00 €View piece →

This page is a season still running: it covers the year to 26 August 2026 and will be extended when the year is. The longer national story is in our history of athletics in the USA.