Rai Benjamin Riding Win Streak Into Paris

SIX TIMES SINCE autumn 2019 have the three fastest men ever to circle the track in the 400 hurdles met in the same race. Following the Tokyo Olympic final of 2021, the trio’s subsequent meetings on four occasions have been celebrated correctly as epic.

Now after taking round 6 at the Monaco DL, Rai Benjamin hopes to ride momentum from two straight wins in the unofficial series to a gold-hued medal upgrade in Paris.

The clash three summers ago under the five rings in the Japanese capital stood out as surely the men’s highlight of that Games — a Karsten Warholm World Record win from Benjamin’s 46.17, still the Nos. 1 and 2 all-time clockings, and Alison dos Santos at 46.72, 0.06 under Kevin Young’s WR that had stood for 29 years until just a month before Tokyo.

The most recent of the trio’s showdowns, that Monaco meeting last week, could not have been a more gripping prequel to Paris Olympics drama. Sprinting powerfully off the final hurdle neck and neck with Warholm, Benjamin finished about a foot in front, 46.67–46.73. In 3rd came ’22 world champion dos Santos at 47.18.

The victory raised the American’s head-to-head versus (they have met 7 times in all) the Norwegian to 3–4 and his tally against the Brazilian to 7–2.

Consider this about the race, an unmatched gathering of the three defending Olympic medalists less than a month before the next Olympic final:  a 47.18, dos Santos’s time in Monaco, was never a non-winner in 400H history before the DL Final of 2019. That competition in Zürich 5 years ago was, coincidentally, the first-ever Warholm-Benjamin meeting and the first race with two men sub-47.00. This combination of stats alone distills the transformation wrought by the “Big 3.”

This isn’t lost on the principals. “I was talking to Karsten on the way here,” Benjamin told reporters at the pre-Monaco press conference. “I was telling him how I feel like the fans and the media don’t appreciate how crazy what we’re doing is, and we’ve gotten so used to seeing 46’s and 46’s. I mean, we’ve opened up our seasons under the previous World Record, which is just insane and hadn’t been done for years and now we’re just cranking out 46’s like it’s just, you know, a normal day.”

At the presser near Monaco’s opulent casinos, the three hurdlers…