Olympic gold medalist Dalilah Muhammad is making this weekend’s World Athletics Ultimate Championship the last meet of her track career.
“I know I’ve said it before, but this is it,” the 36-year-old Muhammad told Lewis Johnson in Budapest on the eve of the meet.
The women’s 400m hurdles rounds are Saturday (semifinals) and Sunday (final), live on NBC Sports and Peacock.
The biennial World Ultimate Championship makes its debut this year.
It gathers 2024 Olympic gold medalists, 2025 World champions and the rest of the world’s highest-ranked athletes in a condensed, three-day meet with semifinals and finals for races 800m and shorter and finals only for the rest of the events.
Each individual event winner earns $150,000 in what World Athletics calls the richest prize pot — $10 million total — in the history of the sport.
“One of the reasons that kept me coming back this year was for the Ultimate Championship,” Muhammad said. “I love to see our sport growing and doing so much more, and I think a big part of me really wanted to be part of that.”
Muhammad previously said she expected 2025 to be her final season, then came back for 2026. She ranks fifth in the world by best time this year — 53.16, which is 1.03 seconds behind world leader and fellow American Anna Cockrell.
In her 400m hurdles career, Muhammad won Olympic gold in 2016 and a world title in 2019, plus broke the world record at the 2019 USA Track and Field Outdoor Championships and the 2019 Worlds.
“The gold was so far from my mind; that definitely wasn’t the goal going into 2016,” she said. “I just wanted to make it as a 400m hurdler.”
Muhammad, after taking silver behind Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone at the Tokyo Games, was challenged by injury in the Paris Olympic cycle.
She placed sixth at the 2024 Olympic Trials. Cockrell, runner-up at trials and silver medalist in Paris, used her post-race TV interview to praise Muhammad.
“You revolutionized this event,” she said. “The impact you’ve had on the sport goes beyond medals, goes beyond records. Your grace, your poise, your competition, your mentorship of me. I can’t say thank you to D enough.”
McLaughlin-Levrone echoed that in 2025.
“Dalilah, you truly did just change the game for all of us,” she said. “I think just seeing you break that world record after so long of it being there, it inspired all of us. So it’s truly because of just the amazing talent you have that we are where we’re at now.”
