Can Letsile Tebogo pick up the pace?

Letsile Tebogo and Shelly-Ann Fraser-Pryce may be as different as two Olympic champions can get, given that Tebogo is 17 years younger, races far more frequently and across a wide range of distances, and so far in 2025 has… not exactly impressed. Tebogo has notched only three wins in eight races so far in 2025, but hopefully his first DL appearance in his strongest event, the 200m, should start to even the score. With his strongest threat coming from American Courtney Lindsey, who’s run 19.71 but only finished sixth at last year’s Olympic Trials, anything less than a win here for Tebogo would be a serious concern.

This time last year, Tebogo had season’s bests of 10.13, 19.71 (wind-aided), and 44.29, compared to 10.03, 20.23, and 45.26 in 2025. Now, the Olympic hangover is real and it’s entirely possible to read Tebogo’s early season run as repeatedly venturing outside his comfort zone in a heavy training block, but at a certain point, the times have to start coming or things start looking more uncomfortable for the 21-year-old star.

Will we see a world record in Yavi’s season opener?

Few athletes had a better August last year than Winfred Yavi, the Bahraini steeplechaser who picked up Olympic gold and the #2 all-time mark in the event only three weeks apart. The latter performance was particularly eye-popping, as Yavi did a lot of solo running to come within a tenth of a second of Beatrice Chepkoech’s 8:44.32 world record. Given that Yavi has now run the second, fourth, and sixth fastest time in history and that in two of those performances she beat the third- and fifth-fastest marks head-to-head, it feels like a foregone conclusion that the 25-year-old has the capacity to break the mark.

But it’s not get ahead of ourselves: while Yavi is an incredible late-summer performer, she only opened up her season in 9:21.62 last year. She has run well at this meet in the past, winning in 2023 and finishing third in a then-PB of 9:02.64 in 2021, but the meet record is only 9:00.12 for a reason—it’s hard to run a fast steeplechase early. But if anyone can do it, Yavi can.

Will anyone throw the men’s discus 70 meters outside of Oklahoma?

The top 11 discus throwers in the world in 2025 have one thing in common: they recorded their best mark of the season in Ramona, Oklahoma. The vaunted Millican Field has yielded 11 of the 13 performances over 70 meters on record so far this season, the only exceptions being world record holder Mykolas Alekna’s throws at his UC Berkeley home meets.

With Alekna absent (presumably in pursuit of an Atlantic Coast Conference title for the Cal Bears, the irony of which cannot be overstated), the odds of a 70+ meter winning throw are way lower, despite having eight names on the start list with PBs north of the barrier. Olympic bronze medalist Matty Denny won four straight competitions to open his season before falling to Alekna, but he’ll nevertheless have his hands full with 2022 World champ Kristjan Čeh and 2023 World champ Daniel Ståhl in the mix.

How does the women’s pole vault pecking order shake out these days?

Can an event be both top-heavy with talent and wide-open? If so, the women’s pole vault certainly fits the bill. A different athlete has won 2023 Worlds, 2024 World Indoors, the 2024 Olympics, and 2025 World Indoors. Four entrants in Doha have personal bests between 4.92m and 5.00m. And the top-ranked athlete in the field is none of those; it’s Canadian Alysha Newman, the current World No. 2.

Katie Moon and Sandi Morris will once again do battle here, and while this is Moon’s outdoor season opener, she probably heads in the favorite as she had an incredibly consistent indoor season, going undefeated in four competitions with winning marks 4.80m or better each time out (plus her seventh U.S. title). But with Brit Molly Caudery, Kiwi Eliza McCartney, and Slovenian Tina Šutej in the field, an American victory is far from guaranteed. It’s a shame the DL isn’t better at broadcasting entire field event competitions, because every height will be a battle with this caliber of entrants.

May certainly isn’t the part of the track season that matters most, but it’s the time when results start to matter more. And with two more DL meets following in quick succession plus a Grand Slam meet only two weeks away, the pro track scene is going to offer a much clearer picture of who’s on top and who’s got work to do by the time the calendar flips to June.

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