By David Melly
January 29, 2025
As we run out the clock on January, it feels like we’re coming out of a long period of darkness—both literally and figuratively, as the days get longer and the track and field calendar starts filling up.
While this weekend doesn’t feature the first track meets of the year, it does feature many of the first big professional meets in close proximity. And with apologies to our friends in New York last weekend, it really does feel like this weekend is the unofficial-official kickoff to the indoor track season. The stars are emerging from their winter-training hibernation and lining up against serious competition, and all of a sudden, World Indoors in seven weeks doesn’t feel quite so far away.
So as we head into a jam-packed weekend of indoor track racing around the country (and the world), here are a few key questions on our minds:
Is this track and field’s opening weekend?
One of the weird things about track and field is that, unlike most other major sports, we don’t operate by a set season calendar. Sure, almost everyone circles the global championship on the calendar, but plenty of pros continue their seasons following Worlds or the Olympics, and nobody starts at the same time.
Instead, we roughly follow an annual cycle beginning in January—except the NCAA indoor season kicked off in December, and the Worlds qualifying window opened last August (for most events). Some pros have been racing on the roads or grass for weeks; others will seemingly disappear until May.
According to the calendar World Athletics wants us to pay the most attention to, the first “gold” meet on the WA Indoor Tour kicked off last weekend in Astana, Kazakhstan, but frankly, the results were nothing to write home about. The second gold-label meet is happening today in Belgrade, Serbia, where two-time Olympic long jump champ Miltiadis Tentoglou headlines. And of course, there’s the background trickle of huge stars opening up their season’s with low-key rust-busters at small local-to-them meets.
But with the confluence of Friday/Saturday’s BU Terrier Classic and Sunday’s New Balance Indoor Grand Prix, it sure feels like the fireworks signifying the real start to the indoor season will be set off this weekend in Boston. Maybe one day, stronger incentives and guardrails will be erected to ensure that fans and athletes all operate around the same calendar, but until WA chooses to truly rock that particular boat, this is the best we’ve got.
Will Olympic champs pick up where they left off in Boston?
The Grand Prix features the starriest lineup of any of the action on tap, with 100m champions Julien Alfred and Noah Lyles receiving top billing. Olympic hurdles champions Masai Russell, Grant Holloway, and Rai Benjamin are all slated to compete, along with 2020 Olympic 100m champ Marcell Jacobs and World Indoor 60mH champ Devynne Charlton. Notably, none of those entrants are New Balance athletes, which means that meet organizers were able to entice them to show up without being contractually obligated to—nicely done!
Kevin Morris / @kevmofoto
Lyles and Jacobs are squaring off in the 60m, which should be an interesting matchup given Lyles’s greater strength over longer short sprints and Jacobs’s 2022 World Indoor title. Alfred and training partner Dina Asher-Smith are opting instead for the 300m, which is a bit of a shame as Alfred is arguably even better at 60m than 100m, but it’ll still be a fun exhibition for the fans, and a great chance to check in on how Alfred’s post-Olympic work has impacted her strength.
There’s not a ton at stake reputationally for any of these highly-decorated names. You can write off a bad day at the office as “too early in the season” or point to a race not being your specialty distance, but a safe win or stronger-than-expected showing would send a clear message that you haven’t gotten too comfortable atop your throne. Certainly, someone like Gabby Thomas or Shericka Jackson will be closely studying Alfred’s performance for signs that the Paris silver medalist at 200m is stepping up her game in the longer sprints. And for Russell, the chance to improve on her fourth place showing here last year could be an early sign that she’s gunning for a World Indoor title to match her outdoor gold.
How will Graham Blanks and Parker Valby fare in their debuts?
Over in the distance events, sports-marketing eyeballs will be glued to the shiny new New Balance logos on the shoulders of two of the brand’s biggest 2024 pickups, NCAA champions Graham Blanks and Parker Valby, as they make their professional debut.
Justin Britton / @justinbritton
Blanks finished off the 2024 season in high style, defending his national cross country title then clocking the first sub-13 of his career in December in his final race in a Harvard uniform. He and fellow Team USA distance runner Grant Fisher are dropping down in distance to the 1500m, and they’ll have their work cut out for them in a field that includes Commonwealth Games champion Olli Hoare, sub-3:30 runner Stewy McSweyn, and 2022 World champ Jake Wightman (more on that below). But again, here, the name of the game is expectations management, and Blanks will get to check off the “job well done” box by simply finishing mid-pack and knocking a few ticks off a very dusty 3:44.08 1500m PB from 2021.
Valby, on the other hand, will likely have to clear a higher bar as she’s entered in the 3000m, a distance where she was the NCAA champ and fifth-fastest American indoors last year. That being said, with Olympic medalists Georgia Bell and Jessica Hull toeing the line alongside Elise Cranny and her 8:25.10, Valby doesn’t have to win the race to notch a successful start to her pro career.
Given that Valby hasn’t raced since Paris and has since moved from Florida to Massachusetts and switched over to a totally new training system under coach Mark Coogan, it’s perfectly understandable if the 22-year-old—who raced 14 times last season—needs a little more time to adjust. But hey, if she jumps in the deep end and it turns out she can swim (or maybe aqua-jog), that’s a great sign that one of the greatest collegiate athletes to ever circle the oval is just getting started.
Where does Jake Wightman shake out among the 2025 contenders?
Another closely-scrutinized NB runner in the mix on Sunday will be Jake Wightman, the 30-year-old Scot who took gold in Eugene in the 1500m two years ago but missed the latter half of 2024 (and his shot at a second Olympic appearance) with an injury. Wightman returned to racing right after the new year with a 7:44.94 victory at the national indoor 3000m championships in Glasgow, so it’s clear he’s at least able to hit the starting line in decent fighting shape against a much stronger field.
Wightman is clearly one of the most talented milers in the game, with world-beating finishing speed and tactical savvy to match, but he’s also one of the more injury-prone. And given that his specialty event keeps getting more top-heavy with highly-credentialed runners at the apex of their careers, his margin for error has never been slimmer if he wants to return to the podium. It’s tricky to put too much weight on a January showcase as a harbinger of global medal potential in September, but it’ll certainly be on the minds of Team Wightman, his fans, and his rivals.
Will we see even more collegiate records fall at BU?
This year’s John Thomas Terrier Classic may not feature a highly-touted American record or World standard attempt (as far as we are aware) at print time, but pretty much any time a bunch of middle-distance runners hit up BU’s 200-meter trampoline you can’t count out the possibility of history being made. Providence’s Shannon Flockhart and BYU’s Riley Chamberlain are, on paper, quite a bit far off Katelyn Tuohy’s 4:24.26 NCAA mile record (they both have 4:30 PBs), but Flockhart ran 4:05.99 in the 1500m outdoors and Chamberlain anchored the Cougars’ NCAA-winning DMR team in stupendous fashion. Flockhart’s teammate Kimberley May will be similarly hard-pressed to nap Tuohy’s 8:35.20 record in the 3000m, but she’s likely to knock a big chunk off her own PB of 8:54.16.
Kevin Morris / @kevmofoto
Newly-minted NCAA 3000m record holder Ethan Strand may still be feeding off the good vibes from his big day at BU in December, and Cooper Teare’s 3:50.39 mile record from 2021 does increasingly seem to be living on borrowed time given the caliber of runners who’ve followed him through the collegiate ranks in the years since. It feels less likely than Tuohy’s mile record going down, but then again: who had “Ethan Strand 7:30.15” on their 2024 bingo card? In the 5000m, New Mexico’s Habtom Samuel will try to do what Blanks failed to do in December and knock Nico Young’s 12:57.14 down a slot on the NCAA all-time list. He’ll likely need some ambitious pacing help to get there. But Adriaan Wildschutt, who helped push Young to that record en route to his 12:56.76 victory at this race last year, is back to defend his title and should keep things honest up front.
What do the steeplechasers have in store for the 5000m?
Two notable names that also pop out on the entry list in the 5000m are BYU alumni-turned-Paris Olympians Courtney Wayment and Kenneth Rooks, both former NCAA champions in the steeplechase who parlayed their collegiate success into spots on Team USA. Now, they likely don’t need a qualifier in this particular event for Worlds, but a strong flat-track performance can be a good indicator of fitness later in the spring. Wayment herself is proof positive of that hypothesis: she ran 14:49.78 at this meet last year, and then came back and clocked her 9:06.50 steeplechase PB at Olympic Trials exactly five months later.
It’s also notable that (at least as far as World Athletics’s tracking is concerned), this will be Rooks’s 5000m debut on the track. So he’s a bit of an unknown when it comes to longer distances—at least as much of an unknown as an Olympic silver medalist can be.
How will Shelby Houlihan’s return to the track be received?
Lastly, but impossible to ignore, is the announcement that Shelby Houlihan will be making her return to racing on Saturday at the Razorback Invitational in Fayetteville, Arkansas. Houlihan, whose four-year ban for testing positive for a prohibited substance ended on January 13th, is slated to race the 3000m and has expressed her intent to compete at the U.S. Indoor Championships, should she qualify… which she almost certainly will.
The return of one of the sport’s more controversial figures raises questions of both fitness— where will she stack up in the new world order of 2025 middle-distance running?—and perception—will she be cheered, booed, or both, by the fans the moment she steps on the track? There will almost certainly be a mixed reaction to her reemergence on the circuit.
It’s unlikely that every question hanging over our heads in 2025 will be answered definitively by the time our calendars flip to February, but we’ll have a lot more information once the unofficial ribbon is cut and the floodgates are open this weekend. And along the way, there will be a heckuva lot of good racing to watch.
David Melly
David began contributing to CITIUS in 2018, and quickly cemented himself as an integral part of the team thanks to his quick wit, hot takes, undying love for the sport and willingness to get yelled at online.
