A sprint phenom and straight-A student at the Bullis School, Wilson had already become a future star of American track and field. The future arrived suddenly Friday night. With “Bullis” emblazoned on the front of his uniform, Wilson ran 400 meters in 44.66 seconds, breaking the under-18 world record and breaking an American record that Darrell Robinson had held for 42 years.
Wilson headed to the start line in a racing jersey that New Balance let him design himself, a Maryland state flag design. He had never broken 45.13 seconds before, but he knew the time of 44.84, the under-18 world record set by Justin Robinson five years ago.
“I’ve been watching this all season,” Wilson said.
Wilson’s time surpassed the American high school record by 0.03 seconds. It also allowed him to comfortably win his heat and made him the second-fastest qualifier for the 400 meters semi-finals on Sunday. The top three from Monday’s final will travel to Paris. In an open field after world champion Michael Norman, Wilson declared himself a legitimate threat.
“I expected him to run fast,” said Chris Bailey, the third fastest in qualifying. “I didn’t expect him to run away that fast. And I give him his props. What he did all year was incredible.
Hayward Field aficionados had taken note of Wilson’s early exploits. When the public address announced his name at the starting line, Wilson received the biggest cheers. On a night when Athing Mu made his season debut after recovering from a hamstring injury, Sha’Carri Richardson began his quest to make his first Olympic team and Oregon native Ryan Crouser launched a shot into orbit, Wilson became the main attraction.
“It’s a different game,” Wilson said. “I no longer run the school. I run with the big dogs.
There’s no shortage of Wilson’s youth. He barely has any peach fuzz, and his smile — “that million-dollar smile,” trainer Joe Lee said — makes him look even younger than 16 years old. On the track, however, Wilson never blinked. As he crossed the finish line, he waved to his home crowd, welcoming even more cheers as his crackling time was displayed on the scoreboard.
“Probably like a 2,” Wilson said, of his nerves on a scale of 1 to 10. “I’m racing against bigger people who have marks and things like that. For me, everyone puts their pointe shoes the same way I do. I train as hard as them. It’s just the best of the best competing.
Lee believed Wilson was capable of it at that time. In the fall, Lee put Wilson through a test, putting 45 seconds on a stopwatch and then measuring how far Wilson could sprint in that time. When the clock struck zero, Wilson had covered 399.2 yards. Lee double-checked his watch to make sure he hadn’t added a few seconds by mistake.
The experience on the Hayward track helped. Last summer, at an under-20 competition here, Wilson dropped to fourth place after breaking into a full sprint mid-race, a sign of his overexcitement at his first major national competition. Lee used the race as a lesson.
“We’re going to come back here,” Lee said then, “and it’s going to be very different.”
Lee pointed out that Wilson is still a kid, a rising junior in high school, barely straddling adolescence. Among academic awards, Wilson won a Bullis honor called the Joy of Life Award. But he did not hold back their expectations. Wilson, this winter and spring’s All-Met Athlete of the Year, has dreamed of the Olympics since he started running track at age 8, and he doesn’t want to wait until he’s 20 years.
“He’s still a 16-year-old young man – he would be upset if I called him a boy,” Lee said. “He’s not a pro yet, although mentally he’s up there with the best of them. He’s not afraid when he comes in here. He’s not intimidated. He believes he belongs because he does. We knew it was possible.
Wilson’s next challenge will be to prove he can handle the burden of a multi-round competition. He has previously sought advice from stars Noah Lyles and Grant Holloway on how to maintain his stamina. Lee had Wilson run a pair of 4×400 relays five hours apart this year at the Penn Relays, in part to prepare him.
“He trains harder than anyone I’ve ever seen,” Lee said. “For us, it’s just a day-to-day job. Yes, he can do it. I think he has more in him.
“This is just the first round,” Wilson said. “I hope there will be more records to break.”
As one Maryland track and field star began his rise, another met a heartbreaking end. Matthew Centrowitz, a former Broadneck High student who won a gold medal at the 2016 Olympics, will miss the U.S. Olympic Trials with a hamstring injury, costing him his bid to reach his fourth and last Olympic Games.
“Unfortunately, I won’t get the fairytale ending I was hoping for,” Centrowitz said in an X post.
Centrowitz said in March that 2024 would be his final year, timed for one final 1,500-meter race at the Paris Olympics. In recent weeks, two ailments have derailed him. After competing in the Los Angeles Grand Prix in May, Centrowitz fell ill and missed a week of training. When he returned, he pulled his hamstring.
Centrowitz attempted to recover in time for the start of testing. He healed to the point where he could run, but said he was unable to run at a pace that would allow him to compete.
“It’s been just as difficult physically and mentally these last three weeks to stay optimistic about my ability to compete,” Centrowitz said. “Unfortunately, I ran out of time.”
Centrowitz still traveled to Eugene to attend trials and support old friends. He would have seen Mu run the 800m in 2:01.73, qualifying for the semi-finals with an effortless second place in his heat. “It was pretty smooth,” Mu said. “It was like my first race back. The legs were waking up a little.
Shortly after Mu finished, Richardson made her first appearance at the trials since 2021, when she won the 100 meters but lost her spot after testing positive for marijuana. She won a world championship last summer and ran a time of 10.88, the fastest of any qualifier.
Elsewhere, Eric Holt, the 29-year-old who stopped working in an upstate New York psychiatric ward to pursue his Olympic dream, qualified for Saturday’s 1500m semi-finals by reaching a time of 3:35.86 in a quick qualifying heat, the fifth. best time of the evening.
Before the competition, Centrowitz ran into Evan Jager, a stalwart in the 3,000-meter hurdles, at the airport. They remember all their years of competing against each other. “He told me, ‘You have to do it for the old people,’” Jaeger said, “Do it for me.” »
The young people, first and foremost Wilson, are not going to make their task easy.