Keni Harrison is STILL the FASTEST hurdler to never win a World title

Keni Harrison finished second in the 100 hurdles at the USA championships in 2023. Which doesn’t seem like such big a deal until you realize who Keni Harrison actually is. She was the world record holder in the 100 hurdles for six years straight. A record that only just fell in 2022. She actually entered the USA meet as the fastest hurdler in the nation once again. The truth is that nobody has been this fast for this long in the history of the 100 hurdles. But Keni Harrison does not get the credit she deserves. That is because she has never won a gold medal on the world stage in her signature event. At this point it is the only thing left for her to accomplish on the track. You could say she’s the fastest underachiever the world has ever seen. But she only has to win one more race. It is the one race that she needs to run, to cement her legacy as the greatest women’s hurdler to ever do it, and this is why.

Keni Harrison has always been dominant

Keni Harrison is an athlete whom we should have seen coming from a mile away. At the high school level she dominated the state of North Carolina with a personal best of 13.49. But she became the New Balance national champion in the 60 hurdles and the 100 hurdles. So it’s safe to say that to win anything in high school her senior year, you had to go through her. As if that wasn’t enough, entering her senior year she competed at the Junior Olympics and won the double in the 100 and 400 hurdles. She may not have been the fastest hurdler in the nation technically at that time. But anyone who was paying attention could see that she was clearly one of the great ones.

After high school she took her talents to Clemson University which was a sprinting powerhouse in the ACC at the time. Depending on how you look at it she was either one of the greatest freshman hurdlers we’d ever seen, or an underachiever. She didn’t make the 100 hurdles final at the NCAAs as a freshman. However, had she run almost any of the hurdle times she had dropped in her past four races in the semifinal, she likely would have qualified with a great shot at getting a medal. Her sophomore year she ran even faster, and finished fifth overall. She then transferred to Kentucky in the SEC only to finished fifth at the NCAAs again as a junior. But her senior year she finally wore the crown as the Division 1 NCAA champion.

Keni is in the golden era of hurdling

All of this matters because the women Keni was losing to back then have all been something special. America has been so good at the women’s 100 hurdles that they swept the world at the 2016 Olympics, going gold, silver, and bronze without Keni Harrison even at the meet. The Olympic champion that year was the NCAA champion back in 2013, Brianna Rollins who was Keni’s college teammate at Clemson. Keni wasn’t there at the Olympics because she failed to qualify at the Olympic trials. But just several weeks later in a Diamond League event she broke the World Record in the 100 hurdles. So the Olympics, a competition for the greatest athletes in the world, took place without the greatest woman to ever do it.

Since that moment, the world has been waiting for Keni to win the medal that we all know she deserves. You could argue that her world record was a fluke, until you realize that 3 of the 10 fastest hurdle times ever recorded are by her. Once she left college a champion she got even faster, and held onto that form year after year. She got silver at the 2019 world championships and silver again at the Tokyo Olympics, which is a huge let down when you are the World Record holder. Now that Tobi Amusan has broken her record, you can’t call her the favorite anymore. But it doesn’t matter, because the hurdles are a race where anything can happen. Lolo Jones is proof of that, and Keni has been on the losing end of chance for long enough.

The Bottom Line

Keni is the fastest American this year, she’s also  the fastest American ever. According to the clock there is only one woman on the planet supposedly has what it takes to legitimately beat her. Track and field isn’t about running fast, it's about doing so in the one race that you need to run. Keni Harrison knows which race she needs to run. Hopefully the world gets to see her win it. Since nobody has really proven they can actually beat her at her best, Keni won’t be the only loser if she’s not the first across the line. We will all be missing out, because we didn’t get to see the best do what only she can.

LOOK GOOD, FEEL GOOD, RUN GOOD.

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