Episode Details

Unlike “normal” global championship years, this professional season ended with three championships of a sort: the Diamond League final, World Ultimate Championships, and World Road Running Championships.

As its name implies, the “ultimate” championship feels like the closest thing we had this year to a be-all-end-all determination of who’s the best athlete in their respective events, but it’s easier to look at the calendar and suggest that success in other forays—whether it’s the European Championships, regular-season DL circuit, Commonwealth Games, or something else entirely—could mean the same or more than a trophy in Budapest.

That made sorting out our year-end power rankings all the more challenging. How do you account for a steeplechaser who didn’t have the option of competing at WUC? Or a sprinter who ran really well, but didn’t necessarily face the same competition as a U.S. championship?

When we first took on this assignment in June, World Indoors was the single biggest event on the schedule you could point to as evidence of championship mettle, and spillover good vibes from 2025 were still in the air. That’s no longer true. 2025, and even this year’s indoor season, are both increasingly distant memories. What have you (the top 25 athletes on the track and in the field) done for us lately?

As always, there’s a healthy dose of subjectivity that goes into these rankings. How do you compare a single-event specialist against a more generalized sprinter or distance runner? How much does consistency over the regular season matter compared to winning when it “counts?” How much does the top-end talent of an event or event group like the women’s 800m or the men’s pole vault elevate a star who didn’t win all that much? How much should you weigh consistently beating a deep field of competition, like in the women’s 100m hurdles or men’s 100m?

Top 25 Track Athletes of 2026:

25 – Femke Bol
 24 – Djamel Sedjati
 23 – Gabby Thomas
 22 – Emma Zapletalova
 21 – Cooper Lutkenhaus
 20 – Keely Hodgkinson
 19 – Likina Amebaw
 18 – Faith Cherotich
 17 – Jakob Ingebrigtsen
 16 – Cameron Myers
 15 – Georgia Hunter Bell
 14 – Klaudia Kazimierska
 13 – Oblique Seville
 12 – Emmanuel Wanyonyi
 11 – Rai Benjamin
 10 – Julien Alfred
 9 – Marileidy Paulino
 8 – Kenny Bednarek
 7 – Collen Kebintashipi
 6 – Ja’Kobe Tharp
 5 – Josh Kerr
 4 – Audrey Werro
 3 – Melissa Jefferson-Wooden
 2 – Alison dos Santos
 1 – Masai Russell

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