What We Learned From Day 3 of the U.S. Olympic Track and Field Trials

There were four race finals in Eugene, Ore. on Sunday evening, as well as the completion of the men’s decathlon, with some of the most prominent track and field stars competing.

Here’s a look at each of those races, and who has stamped their ticket to Tokyo:

Women’s 400 meters

The nine-time Olympic medalist Allyson Felix made her fifth, and final, Olympic team by taking second. Felix was fourth heading into the final 100 meters, but managed to run down the competition. The 29-year-old Quanera Hayes (an earlier version of this article misstated her age as 19) won the event handily, while Wadeline Jonathas held on to take third place.

Men’s 400 meters

Michael Norman, who has run the fourth-fastest 400 meters of all time, took a lead fairly early on and didn’t look back. He was joined by teammate Michael Cherry, who was on the 4×400 relay team that won gold at the 2019 world championships. Randolph Ross, who won the 400 at the N.C.A.A. championships last weekend, held on for third place, edging out his North Carolina A&T teammate Trevor Stewart.

Men’s decathlon

It is nearly impossible to summarize the 10 event decathlon finals in just a paragraph, but we’ll try. Garrett Scantling, who once went to a training camp with the Atlanta Falcons, led from practically the beginning, and won the event. Steven Bastien performed particularly well in the running events, winning the 100 and the 400 meter, and finished second. Zach Ziemek won the long jump and the pole vault, and took second in the high jump, to finish in third. Neither Bastien nor Ziemek had the Olympic standard coming into the trials, but both achieved it in Oregon and are set for Tokyo.

Women’s 100 meter hurdles

Kendra “Keni” Harrison was the quickest out of the blocks, propelling her to victory in the women’s 100 meter hurdles. She was followed closely by Brianna McNeal in second, while Christina Clemons barely edged out Gabbi Cunningham for fourth. They both officially finished in 12.53, but Clemons ran the race in 12.521 while Cunningham finished in 12.526.

But Cunningham might still go to Tokyo. McNeal has been suspended for five years for an antidoping violation, but was allowed to run while she appeals the suspension. Her fate, and therefore Cunningham’s, should be decided in the next few weeks.

Men’s 100 meters

Trayvon Bromell, who has the world’s fastest time this year, took first place in 9.80 and will have a chance at winning the medal that eluded him in Rio, where he finished eighth. Ronnie Baker, who has never competed in an international event, took second in a personal best 9.85. Third place went to Fred Kerley, who took bronze in the 2019 world championships in the 400 meters. In going from longer distances to shorter ones, Kerley is bucking the usual progression of shorter to longer as runners age.

Two of the biggest names in the race, Noah Lyles and Justin Gatlin, finished seventh and eighth. Lyles is the 200-meter world champion and was trying to add the 100 to his arsenal, while Gatlin, who won gold in the 100 at the 2004 Games, pulled up with what looked like a hamstring injury.

There are seven more days of competition to come. Monday’s events include the women’s 1,500-meter final, the men’s 800 final, and the women’s 5,000 final. Tuesday, June 22 and Wednesday, June 23 will be counted as rest days.

The men’s hammer throw and the women’s triple jump, two of the track and field events that the United States has historically been the worst at, had a chance to shine Sunday evening, as did the women’s high jump. Here what happened:

Men’s hammer throw

With his second throw in the finals, Rudy Winkler both set a national record and achieved the second-farthest throw in the world this year, behind only Paweł Fajdek of Poland, a four-time world champion in the event. Winkler has a chance at becoming the first American man to medal in the hammer throw since 1996.

He will be joined by Daniel Haugh and Alex Young, neither of whom have attended an Olympics before, but they do have the fifth and 10th farthest throws this year.

Women’s high jump

The American high jump team at the Tokyo Olympics will look a lot like the one at the 2016 Rio Olympics. Vashti Cunningham won the event by being the only jumper fly over the bar at 6 feet 5 inches. Inika McPherson and Nicole Greene both surpassed 6 feet 4 inches, but McPherson placed second by virtue of doing it cleanly on her first attempt, while Greene needed two attempts. Cunningham and McPherson both competed in Rio, while Greene was a national champion at the University of North Carolina.

Women’s triple jump

Keturah Orji, the American outdoor record-holder, and Tori Franklin, the American indoor record-holder, took the top two places in the women’s triple jump final, as expected. Orji won the event with a 14.52 meter jump, while Franklin won the crowd by demanding (and receiving) loud staccato claps from the crowd before each jump. They will be joined in Tokyo by Jasmine Moore, a University of Georgia freshman who took second at the N.C.A.A. championships last weekend.

An American woman has never medaled in this event at the Olympics, though Orji finished fourth in Rio.

Allyson Felix has qualified for her fifth Olympic Games, where she will take aim at becoming the most decorated track and field athlete in Olympic history.

Felix qualified for next month’s Olympics in Tokyo by finishing second in the 400-meter finals at the Olympic trials, with a time of 50.02 seconds. Felix, who started on the outside in lane eight, was in fourth place rounding the curve into the final homestretch, but caught two competitors to book her plane ticket to Tokyo. The crowd at Hayward Field gave her a standing ovation.

In Tokyo she will race the 400 meters and could be on both relay teams for the women’s 4×400 and the mixed gender 4×400, a new event. She is also scheduled to run in the 200 meters at the trials, which begin qualifying on Thursday.

An improbable four medals in Tokyo would give her 13 career Olympic medals, the most ever for a track and field athlete, surpassing the 12 held by Paavo Nurmi, the “Flying Finn” who won numerous distance medals in the 1920s. If she wins two or more, she will surpass Carl Lewis as the most decorated American track and field athlete ever.

Joining Felix in the 400 meters in Tokyo will be Quanera Hayes and Wadeline Jonathas. Hayes has run the sixth-fastest time outdoors this season, while Jonathas has the eighth-fastest time, and took fourth place at the 2019 world championships.

Felix, 35, first attended the Olympics as an 18-year-old in 2004 in Athens, where she won a silver medal in the 200, the event she specialized in throughout her career. But she took silver in the 400 five years ago in Rio, and has been on three consecutive gold medal-winning 4×400 meter relay teams.

The last few years have brought a number of challenges off the track for Felix. Her daughter, Camryn, who has made a number of appearances at the trials, was born via an emergency C-section at 32 weeks in 2018. Camryn, or Cammy as Felix calls her, was quick to join Felix on the track after she qualified for Tokyo.

Felix later detailed how her sponsor, Nike, did not support her during this period and would not guarantee in future contracts that she “wouldn’t be punished if I didn’t perform at my best in the months surrounding childbirth,” as she wrote in The New York Times. Felix is now sponsored by Athleta.

It’s only the third of ten days at the Olympic trials, but a number of finals have already been contested.

Assuming the athletes have hit the qualifying standard in their respective event, we already know a number of athletes who have qualified to go to Tokyo. So far, Team U.S.A. consists of:

Men’s shot put

• Ryan Crouser

• Joe Kovacs

• Payton Otterdahl

Men’s 10,000 meter race

• Woody Kincaid

• Grant Fisher

• Joe Klecker

Women’s discus throw

• Valarie Allman

• Micaela Hazlewood

• Rachel Dincoff

Women’s 100 meter race

• Sha’Carri Richardson

• Javianne Oliver

• Teahna Daniels

Men’s hammer throw

• Rudy Winkler

• Daniel Haugh

• Alex Young

Women’s triple jump

• Keturah Orji

• Tori Franklin

• Jasmine Moore

Women’s high jump

Women’s 400 meters

• Quanera Hayes

• Allyson Felix

• Wadeline Jonathas

Men’s 400 meters

• Michael Norman

• Michael Cherry

• Randolph Ross

Women’s 100 meter hurdles

• Keni Harrison

• Brianna McNeal*

• Christina Clemons

*McNeal has been suspended for five years for antidoping violations, but was allowed to compete while she appeals her suspension. If she is unsuccessful in her appeal, Gabbi Cunningham, who finished fourth, will take McNeal’s spot.

Men’s 100 meters

• Trayvon Bromell

• Ronnie Baker

• Fred Kerley

The biggest story of the trials so far is what happened before they even began when Shelby Houlihan, American record-holder in the 1500 meters, announced she had tested positive for a steroid and had been banned from the sport for four years. Houlihan blamed her positive test on meat she says she ate in a burrito, and has vowed to appeal the judgment.

Surprisingly, U.S.A. Track & Field said she could still run in the trials, a decision that was seemingly against the rules of international sporting organizations and antidoping bodies. A number of those groups — as well as some of Houlihan’s fellow competitors — condemned the decision, and it was quickly reversed.

Houlihan is not the only athlete with a chance at an Olympic medal who is missing from the Trials. Christian Coleman, who won the 100 meter race at the 2019 world championships, was banned for 18 months after missing his third drug test in a year. Brianna McNeal, who won gold in the 100 meter hurdles at the Rio Olympics, has been banned for five years for “tampering within the results management process,” but is running at the trials while she appeals her suspension, which should be heard before the Olympics begin.

It was 87 degrees when the men’s hammer throw final began at 7:25 p.m. ET, and it will not be much cooler when the men’s 100 meter final is run a few hours later. The heat will affect athletes competing in every event, but especially competitors running longer distances.

The full effect will not be on display Sunday, as the longest finals are the men’s and women’s 400 meter races. But on Monday night the women running in the 10,000 meter finals will have to decide whether and how much to dial things back because of the heat.

Through the first two days there has been a persistent north-to-south breeze in Hayward Stadium, in the face of runners on the backstretch and behind them on the homestretch.

Ben True, who finished an agonizing fourth in the men’s 10,000 meter finals on Friday evening, said the wind prevented him from making a necessary surge, costing him a chance at making the Olympic team.

“There was a pretty stiff wind on the back stretch and I thought if I made a move the three guys behind — Woody, Grant, and Joe — were all going to be able to match me,” True said.

To qualify for the Olympics it is not enough just to finish in the top three in an event. Just ask Micaela Hazlewood.

Hazlewood, who competed in the discus and shot put for Purdue University and then as a graduate student for the University of Kentucky, finished second in the discus finals Saturday night, throwing a personal best 62.54 meters.

But she is missing the qualifying standard that would stamp her ticket to Tokyo.

If each country was allowed to qualify three athletes in each track and field event at the Olympics, the competition would be impossible to manage, with dozens of rounds of qualifiers. So there is a qualifying standard, a minimum distance, height or time an athlete must achieve to compete in the Olympics.

For the women’s discus, the qualifying standard is 63.50, and the deadline to achieve it is June 29. Hazlewood’s plan to achieve it, and therefore join the Olympic team, in the next 10 days?

“That is what I am going to leave here today and try and figure that out,” Hazlewood said Saturday night, when asked if she had any meets lined up. “Probably hit a couple of them trying to hit that mark.”

An extra 96 centimeters is all it will take.

Already an Olympic gold medalist and record holder in the shot put, Ryan Crouser added a new line to his already impressive resume on Friday night: World Record Holder.

Crouser uncorked a throw of 76 feet, 8 ¼ inches, not just besting the record previously held by Randy Barnes, but smashing it by a full ten inches. The previous record was also set under dubious circumstances, as just two months later Barnes tested positive for steroids, and was banned for 27 months. Eight years later Barnes tested positive for androstenedione, and was banned from track and field for life.

Crouser’s biggest competition in Tokyo will probably be his American teammate Joe Kovacs, who finished in second place on Friday night. Kovacs also finished second to Crouser at the 2016 Olympics in Rio, and is a two time world champion at the shot put.

If you only want to watch the marquee races Sunday night, you’re in luck. But if you are a die-hard fan of the jumping and throwing events, you might have to work a little bit harder.

NBC will have coverage of the trials from 9 p.m. to 11 p.m. ET. They will start with the women’s 100 meter hurdles semifinals and end with the men’s 100 meter finals, covering three other finals and a number of running qualifying rounds between.

But if you tune in right at 9 p.m. ET, you’ll be missing part of the finals in three field events, which start as early as 7:25 p.m. ET (men’s hammer throw) and as late as 8:55 p.m. ET (women’s triple jump). Those events, as well as a number of decathlon events, can be streamed online at NBCOlympics.com.