From heartbreak to history: Masai Russell completes her Budapest redemption story

Three years ago, Masai Russell left the Budapest track heartbroken. Just out of college, the 23-year-old American 100m hurdler had made it to the penultimate stage of her first World Championships in 2023 when she hit a hurdle and could not finish.

When the world’s top sprinters, throwers, jumpers, and hurdlers descended on Budapest for the inaugural World Athletics Ultimate Championships a few days back, Russell had a chance to rewrite that story.

More so when a tricky 2025 had also seen her finish fourth at the World Championships. The brand-new athletics competition brings together the crème de la crème of track and field for one final showdown at the end of the season in a year when there is no outdoor World Athletics Championships.


And, Budapest’s Gyula Zsivotzky National Athletics Centre was the stage for the reigning world, Olympic, and Diamond League champions, along with those who qualified via their world ranking and a small number of exceptional invitees, to compete across 26 individual events and two relays. Aiming to attract a younger audience, the $10 million three-day championships were designed to keep the action moving quickly.

Hence, unlike a traditional championship, there were no heats. Some track disciplines had two semi-finals before a final, while the 1500m, 5000m, and relays were straight finals.

Russell had entered the competition just days after breaking the world record with a 12.09 triumphat Diamond League in Zurich. The Paris 2024 Olympic gold medallist shaved 0.03 seconds off Nigeria’s Tobi Amusan’s previous world record, set at the 2022 World Championships, doing so in still conditions with no wind assistance. “If we get a 1.9 wind behind my back, that could have been a sub-12 race. I do think it is possible,” Russell said after her race on August 27. While the Budapest track triumph might have just looked a statistical formality for her, there was a lot more at stake.

Even though Russell had by then joined an elite group of athletes, an unbeaten streak and closure were still pending. She became the first woman to hold both the Olympic title and the 100m hurdles world record since Bulgaria’s Yordanka Donkova in 1988.

Donkova’s world record had stood till 2016. The theatre that these tracks are, Russell’s start was quite anticlimactic on a chilly Budapest evening. She was trailing behind Bahamas’ Devynne Charlton before she decided to settle that old score with the track. With her muscles not “firing the way that they usually do”, she took longer to get warmed up.

But when she did, she picked up speed and then the lead to negotiate those last couple of barriers like a mere ceremony and reached the finish line in 12.22 seconds.

Amusan followed with 12.34 and the European champion Nadine Visser took the third spot with 12.39. With that, Russell , who started racing the 100m hurdles as a high school senior, capped her sensational season with a 14th consecutive victory and an undefeated 2026.

While at the University of Kentucky, she also ran 400m hurdles, she picked 100m once she turned pro in 2023, to save herself from the injuries she would pick while training for the 400m. “I left here very sad three years ago.

Now to be a record holder, Olympic champion… and then to do it at the Ultimate Championship on the same track, it just shows all the work,” the 26-year-old said of the happy ending to her Budapest story. Now that sub-12 race rightly sounds like a perfect next chapter.