Your editor met Grant Holloway in Doha, Qatar, in 2019. The interview was about fifteen minutes, and Grant Holloway was fantastic. Deji Ogeyingbo wrote this piece about the Men’s 110m hurdles and the exceptional athletes who compete in this event and will battle in Budapest, Hungary, next week.
Grant Holloway faces a big hurdle in the quest for a third-world title in Budapest.
Very few athletes in Track and Field can boast of the winning ratio that Grant Holloway commands since he started running professionally. You can liken it to a high school student who has always come out top of his class bar a few second or third-place finishes in some papers. That’s the level of dominance Holloway has built for himself in both the men’s 60mH and 110mH.
The American holds the world indoor 60m record with 7.29s and is his lifetime best of 12.81s, just 0.01s off Aries Merritt’s world record of 12.80s. For an event in which the margin for error is very slim, Holloway has carved a niche for himself as the most commanding sprint hurdler in the world for the last four years.
Some athletes that might come to this level of dominance are the likes of Mondo Duplantis in the Pole Vault, Yulimar Rojas in the Triple Jump, or perhaps Ryan Crouser in the Shot Put. However, these are athletes that compete in field events and have a minimum of three tries to get the perfect results. Not so for Holloway. Ten hurdles, and he’s expected to scale them with perfection.
The American hasn’t been at his top form judging by his standards, having lost a race in May to Jamaica’s Rasheed Broadbell, who will be his stiffest competition going into the world championships in Budapest this month. And unlike in 2021, where Holloway had not lost any race leading into the Olympic Games in Tokyo but eventually losing the final to Jamaica’s Hansle Parchment, here he knows there are more sterner rivals looking to knock him off his perch.
As expected, Holloway made light work of his indoor season, one in which he has become synonymous with dominating. The Olympic Silver medalist followed it up with yet another fine season outdoors in which he clocked another sub-13 clocking at the Paris Diamond…
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