From Canada’s McCreath to U.S.’s Anthony, recent breakthroughs set up interesting track season for 2026

A search engine optimization textbook would tell me to start by discussing Noah Lyles, who finished third in last weekend’s U.S. Indoor Track & Field Nationals, and who remains the sport’s biggest name. He’s the first person casual fans Google, so every well-placed mention is a potential source of traffic for click-hungry sports sites.

We’ll get back to Lyles, who has taken to strutting around with a gold-plated championship belt, but he finished third and I prefer to focus first on winners from last weekend, like Jordan Anthony, who ran a 6.45-second race to win his first U.S. 60-metre title.

And like Ajax native Sade McCreath, who broke through and levelled up when she ran 7.12 to win a Canadian national title at 60 metres last Saturday. That result sheared more than a tenth of a second of her previous personal best, put her in the top 20 worldwide this season, and tied her with Angela Bailey as the second-fastest Canadian ever. Among Canucks, McCreath now trails only Philomena Mensah, who ran 7.02 in 1999 and again in 2000. 

Different nations, different stages — U.S. nationals aired live on NBC while the Canadian streamed online — but the same bottom line. Anthony and McCreath raised the ceiling and the standard, and their national championship breakthroughs helped set up plotlines that local track fans can follow from here, to World Indoor Championships (March 20-22), straight into the outdoor season.

Looking big picture, 2026 is an even number but an odd year for world-class track and field athletes. No Olympics or world championships to anchor the calendar. And likely no sophomore season Grand Slam Track, which purported to provide paydays to top-flight runners before an acute shortage of cash caused the league to cancel its finale, then declare bankruptcy in December.

As for global events, there’s World Relays, scheduled for May in Gaborone, Botswana. It’s outside the midsummer spotlight, but a chance for Canada to win world-level medals, or test out new lineups to plan for life after Brown/Blake/Rodney/ De Grasse.

And then there’s the World Athletics Ultimate Championships in Budapest this September, an attempt by World Athletics to add some drama to non-championship years. It’s an intriguing concept, and a chance for athletes to get paid, but we won’t know how it shapes up as a sports property until it actually happens.

Until then, the sport’s biggest names are spending their winters in a variety of ways. Kishane Thompson and some of his Jamaican compatriots have lined up in some outdoor 60-metre races — Thompson clocked 6.46 on Feb 28, putting him third worldwide.

Sha’Carri Richardson and Christian Coleman announced that they would head to Australia to compete in Stalwell Gift, a sprint race with a pros-vs-joes format. Richardson and Coleman will run the full 120 metres, and their non-professional opponents will line up at various points ahead of them. Whoever finishes first is the winner, and the drama is in seeing whether the pros can overcome a carefully-calibrated handicap.

For their part, Anthony, McCreath and others have taken a more traditional approach to an off-year winter, laying down fast times at indoor meets and speeding toward World Indoors, which takes place in Kujawy Pomorze, Poland.

Which brings us back to Lyles, who hauled his title belt to Ocean Breeze Athletic Complex in Staten Island, N.Y., and who used a pre-race interview with NBC’s Lewis Johnson to test out his new pro wrestling heel persona. If you caught on to the schtick, you probably also noticed that the gap between that promo and Randy Savage’s classic, The Cup of Coffee, is as wide as the one between Lyles’ speed and Tyreek Hill’s. But then you also recognize that this new character is a work in progress, and that the big difference between an interview and a wrestling promo is that promos are scripted.

Track meets, however, are real life drama, and Lyles’ Ric Flair act fell flat when Anthony, last year’s NCAA 100-metre champ, and a Lyles training partner, blew his stablemate’s doors off in the 60-metre final. 

In the fall of 2024, Anthony was the fastest football player on earth, moonlighting as a wide receiver on the football team at the University of Arkansas. Now he’s focused on track, and faster than ever. The 6.43-second clocking he registered at the Tyson Invitational in Fayetteville, Ark., is the fastest on the planet this season, and is .04 seconds faster than his previous personal best. 

And in winning U.S. nationals he edged the veteran Trayvon Bromell, who at 6.47 seconds, is running his fastest 60-metre times in a decade. Ten years and a long list of serious injuries after he first turned pro, Bromell, who ran 6.42 seconds in 2023, is within sniffing distance of his personal best.

Again.

Later this month at Worlds, they’re on course for another clash of classic archetypes. Bromell is the aging star eager to show the next generation he still has his top gear; Anthony’s the young phenom with his own point to prove. Whoever wins that race within the race is likely your world champ.

McCreath, meanwhile, projects as a longshot for the podium — 7.12 would have finished sixth at World Indoors last year — but her clocking at indoor nationals still looms large over Canadian track and field.

Last June, McCreath, who runs leadoff on Canada’s 4×100-metre relay team, laid down 10.95-second 100 metres at a track meet in London, tying the national record Audrey Leduc set in 2024. The following month, at the Edmonton Athletics Invitational, Leduc went 10.94 to reclaim sole possession of the record. So if McCreath’s breakthrough performance last week signals anything, it’s that she’s set to make another serious run at the top spot on Canada’s all-time list this summer. 

Of course, these projections need caveats. I’m sure someone has come up with a calculator that conjures 100-metre predictions from 60-metre splits, but track math has too many variables for those numbers to hold up. 

Health. Wind direction. Running surface. Stakes. Super shoes. Quality of opposition. 

They all factor in, as does that runner’s race model. 

Does that person’s early-race speed come at the cost of late-race endurance? For each sprinter, the answer might vary.

But for McCreath, we know her previous 60-metre PB was 7.26 seconds, which puts her more than a metre behind her 2026 self. We don’t know exactly what her 7.12 in Toronto portends, but that a 0.14 year-to-year improvement says she, like Anthony and Bromell, should feel good about World Indoors, and the coming summer season.