Despite Loss, Oly Champ Russell Looks To “Hold That Throne”

ON A COOL AND RAINY NIGHT during the first of two late summer Swiss DL stops, where five other Paris gold medalists tasted defeat, Masai Russell couldn’t quite add to her back-to-back major victories and pristine collection of 100H marks at 12.25 or better.

But the Lausanne runner-up finish to new 12.28 performer Nadine Visser in a downpour (12.45–12.53) did little to diminish the Olympic champion’s favorite status for next month’s WC, or negate her historically fast ’25. Like a fighter taking a blow but undeterred and ready for more, she quickly brushed it off. The main event awaits in Tokyo just under a month away.

“Yeah, I think the conditions… they are speaking for themselves, based off how I look,” she said, as she shivered under an umbrella during a post-race on-track interview in Lausanne. “But 2nd place, in this weather… It’s all about placing right now and as long as I’m in the top 3 and putting up good numbers, I’m not mad about it.

“I feel physically really good,” she added. “I just ran 12.19 [4] days ago, so I’m still kind of recovering from that. But yeah, other than that, the goal now is just to focus towards Tokyo and, yeah, come up with the win.”

You see, Russell is driven to disprove the notion that in today’s über-competitive women’s 100H landscape — where a run in the 12.3s in good conditions rarely wins (or even places) most of the time — that an athlete can stay on top for more than one championship. NBC commentator Ato Boldon has said, “Nobody gets to sit on the throne for more than a year” in the 100H and, since ’13, he’s right: 9 global championships, 7 different winners, none consecutive. Sally Pearson was the last to pull it off at the ’11 WC/’12 OG.

As Russell told T&FN’s Karen Rosen in February, “My goal is to keep people at my back and just to continue to win. A lot of people said that they didn’t think I could win the Olympics, so I’m going to show them that I want to win the World Championships and hold that throne again for another year.”

In ’24, Russell won the Trials and the Games, but T&FN ’s World Rankings panel could not find grounds to rate her any higher than No. 3 for the season because she didn’t have any other wins in more than a dozen races, including 5 DLs.

’25 is a…