Oblique Seville & Melissa Jefferson-Wooden seize the spotlight, win their first World 100m titles

TOKYO – On a night that featured the departure of one legend (Shelly-Ann Fraser-Pryce) and the reemergence of another (Usain Bolt making a rare appearance in the stands at a global sprint final), two new 24-year-old stars wrote their names into the history books as American Melissa Jefferson-Wooden and Jamaican Oblique Seville won their first global 100-meter titles on Sunday at the World Athletics Championships.

Jefferson-Wooden, last year’s Olympic bronze medalist, began the year overshadowed by her Star Athletics training partner, the mercurial Sha’Carri Richardson. But as she piled up wins this year at Grand Slam Track, the Prefontaine Classic, and the US championships, the spotlight began to shift so that by Tokyo, it was focused on Jefferson-Wooden and her showdown with Olympic champion Julien Alfred of St. Lucia.

That showdown never really materialized, though. Jefferson-Wooden was in the lead by 50 meters, with 21-year-old Jamaican Tina Clayton, not Alfred, her closest challenger. Over the second half, Jefferson-Wooden buried Clayton, Alfred, and everyone else to earn a dominant win in 10.61, with her .15 margin of victory the largest in a Worlds final since 2013. Clayton ran a pb of 10.76 for 2nd while Alfred struggled to recapture her Olympic form and was 3rd in 10.84. Richardson capped an uneven season with a season’s best of 10.94 for 5th while the 38-year-old Fraser-Pryce, the greatest female sprinter of all time, who is retiring at year’s end, was 6th in 11.03 in her 13th global 100m final.

But this night, and this season, belonged to Melissa Jefferson-Wooden. After her Olympic success, she could have been content with bronze – and initially, she was. But after getting married in March, her husband, Rolan, asked her a serious question: “What do you want out of this year?” Jefferson-Wooden realized she did not know the answer. She soon decided: more. Jefferson-Wooden attacked 2025 even more ferociously than she had 2024, working with a chef to dial in her nutrition, asking more questions at practice, and competing every day in practice against the likes of Richardson and Kayla White.

The result of Jefferson-Wooden’s focus was one of the best seasons ever by an American sprinter. Eight finals. Eight wins. Three personal bests. She broke 10.70 seconds three times this year – a feat only Florence Griffith-Joyner, Elaine Thompson-Herah, and Fraser-Pryce have ever accomplished – and her 10.61 pb ranks her fourth on the all-time list, behind only those three names.

Many had wondered whether a long season, which began with Jefferson-Wooden winning at the Grand Slam Track Kingston meet on April 5, would wear her down by mid-September. Instead, she saved the best for last, running 10.61 in Tokyo to break Richardson’s championship record of 10.65. 

“This year has been nothing short of a dream,” Jefferson-Wooden said.

Results

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Seville puts Jamaica back on top in the men’s 100

Oblique Seville has always had the talent to become world champion. If that was not obvious when he ran 9.86 and finished 4th in the World Championships as a 21-year-old, it was certainly made clear when he won convincingly at Diamond Leagues in London (9.86, burying Olympic champ Noah Lyles) and Lausanne (9.87, another shellacking of Lyles in a time that could have been a tenth faster had it not been run in cold rain) earlier this summer.

Yet in Seville’s four previous championship appearances, something had always held him back. In his Olympic debut in Tokyo in 2021 (out in the semis) and his Worlds debut in Eugene in 2022 (4th in the final), it may have been his age, just 20 in Tokyo and 21 in Eugene. In recent years, it was an unfortunate habit of leaving his best race in the rounds. At the 2023 Worlds in Budapest, Seville equalled his pb with a 9.86 in the prelims; that time would have earned him a medal in the final, but he could only manage 9.88 for another fourth-place finish. At the 2024 Olympics, he ran another pb, 9.81 in the semis, only to finish last in the final in 9.91. Once again, his time from the semis would have been enough for a medal.

Given that track record, Seville could have entered Sunday night’s final in Tokyo with a mountain of self-imposed pressure. Seville did not view it that way. Budapest, he said, had been a pleasant surprise; he went into the meet carrying a hamstring injury and had not expected to run well. It was a similar story in Paris, where Seville said his groin flared up in the final.

This year was different. After heading to Europe to race on the Diamond League circuit for the first time in his career and earning two big wins there, Seville arrived in Tokyo healthy and full of confidence. 

“Throughout the years that I have been performing, injury is the thing that always stopped me,” Seville said. “This year, I had a little niggle, but I showed my dominance throughout the season. I said okay, this is my year. I’m going to take this moment and no one is going to take it away from me.”

That is exactly how Seville ran tonight. His countryman Kishane Thompson, who beat Seville at the Jamaican trials in June, started best and led until 80 meters. Just as in last year’s Olympic final in Paris, Thompson found himself run down in the final meters. But this time it was not the feared closer Lyles but Seville, known more for his start, who came back on him. Unlike Paris, Thompson did not have to look at the scoreboard to know the outcome.

“I saw Oblique,” Thompson said. “He was moving and then I was like, oh yeah, I didn’t get it.”

He did not. Thompson’s 9.82 was good for silver but Seville was a clear winner in 9.77, the fastest time in a global 100m final since Christian Coleman’s 9.76 in 2019. Lyles, who got a late start on the season due to a foot injury in May, took the bronze in a season’s best of 9.89 and was happy to have it. Instead, it was US champion Kenny Bednarek who went home devastated, running 9.92 for 4th – a subpar showing following his 9.85 in the semis.

Seville knows that, as a proud son of Jamaica, any sort of sprint success will inevitably draw comparisons to Bolt – even though the 5’7” Seville, quiet and unassuming, is the polar opposite of the bombastic 6’5” Bolt. While Jamaica’s women dominated in the years following the big man’s retirement in 2017, the men had struggled, with no 100m medals at all in the next five championships until Thompson’s silver last year.

Now, Jamaica has its first men’s 100m champion since Bolt at the 2016 Olympics, and Seville doesn’t mind the comparisons. The two men share a homeland and a coach, Glen Mills, and Seville is proud to write the next chapter in the island’s storied sprint history. Jamaica may have a population of just 2.8 million, less than a hundredth the size of the US, but it has the two fastest sprinters in the world right now in Seville and Thompson, as well as the greatest of all time in Bolt.

“[Bolt] is from a country here in Jamaica and I am a country here in Jamaica,” Seville said. “We share the same similarity growing up, so it’s an amazing feeling.”

Jamaica’s 1-2 finish – its first in a global final since Bolt and Yohan Blake at the 2012 Olympics – also stoked the fires of the country’s sprint rivalry with the United States, one that had grown cold until last year. Seville noted that the coaches of tonight’s three medalists all coached major stars back when the rivalry was at its hottest: Mills coached Bolt and Seville, Stephen Francis coached Thompson and Asafa Powell, and Lance Brauman coached Lyles and Tyson Gay. Add in Dennis Mitchell, who coached Bednarek and Justin Gatlin, and Seville says that rather than shrink from comparisons to the past, the sprint stars of the 2020s should embrace their opportunity to play out the same drama in front of a new generation.

“It’s actually something good for us right here,” Seville said. “We are just rewriting history.”

Results

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