The Diamond League – professional track and field’s biggest stage outside of major global championships like the Olympics – is set to kick off its 2026 season this weekend in China’s Keqiao District, and the sport’s biggest names are wasting no time getting things under way. (It’s technically called the Shanghai Diamond League, but is temporarily being held off-site as that city’s stadium is under construction.)
Typically, the first handful of stops on the Diamond League circuit might boast a couple of stacked events, with the rest of the schedule being lighter on starpower. That is simply not the case for this Saturday’s season opener. Every single event has the potential to be a must-watch affair. Speaking of, the meet will be streamed live on FloTrack, beginning at 5:15 a.m. EDT.
Names like Mondo Duplantis, Faith Kipyegon, and Sha’Carri Richardson headline the action, and for good reason. They’re Olympic and World champions, and in the cases of Duplantis and Kipyegon, world record holders. They’re the brightest stars track and field has to offer, and a quick perusal of their backgrounds shows that they’ve been on a trajectory to this point their entire competitive careers.
Mondo won basically all there was to win as a high school pole vaulter in Louisiana, and even began to compete against the professionals before he became one himself after just one year in the NCAA. Faith was the world U18 champion and the world U20 champion over 1500m. All in the span of about 15 months, Sha’Carri won her last Texas state 100m title, got even faster in her one season at LSU, then won the U.S. Olympic Trials 100m. These were athletes whose rises felt meteoric, their future status as champions inevitable.
So is that it? The takeaway here is that to ever have a shot at competing on the sport’s biggest stage, you had to have been an obvious generational talent as a teenager? Hardly. While there certainly are prodigies who made good on their promise represented at meets like this weekend’s in Keqiao, there are plenty of athletes in these deep fields whose path to the Diamond League looked quite a bit different.
Here are just a handful of aspiring Diamond League champions whose origins in the sport looked quite a bit different.
