Ja’Kobe Tharp, then 18, was the youngest high hurdler at the 2024 Olympic Trials. He had no illusions about making the team for Paris. In fact, he chose not to race the trials semifinals due to a pesky hamstring and to rest up for the World U20 Championships.
Yet a conversation at trials with his idol, eventual Olympic gold medalist Grant Holloway, proved prophetic.
“You’re next up,” Tharp recalled Holloway telling him. “He would just tell me that, like, I’ll be next up, and I would be one of the greatest hurdlers ever if I stayed the course.”
A year later, Tharp won the U.S. title in Holloway’s absence on the same Hayward Field track.
Then at last month’s NCAA Championships, also at Hayward, Tharp stunned even himself. The Auburn junior lowered his personal best from 13.01 seconds — outside the 30 fastest men in history — to 12.75, breaking fellow American Aries Merritt’s world record of 12.80 from 2012.
Tharp, in addition to boasting a bowling personal best of 217, is now the only American man to own an individual world record in an Olympic running event.
He turned professional this week ahead of racing at Saturday’s Prefontaine Classic, also at Hayward.
“If anything, it (the world record) has given him a little more of a sharp edge, right?” said Auburn hurdles coach Ken Harnden, a 1996 and 2000 Olympian for Zimbabwe in the 400m hurdles. “He understands that (the target is on his back), but Ja’Kobe is a pressure guy. He enjoys it.”
Tharp, a Vinland Saga fan from Murfreesboro, Tennessee, didn’t make the Rockvale Middle School basketball team in seventh grade. So he went out for track. He fancied the 100m or 200m.
Coach Haneef Sharif encouraged Tharp to try the hurdles. (Sharif knew what he was doing as he was the 1998 and 2000 Ohio Valley Conference champion in the 110m hurdles for Middle Tennessee State.)
Tharp somewhat reluctantly took a crack at clearing 39-inch hurdles.
“I think it might be very few people that chose the hurdles,” Tharp said. “Nobody wants to fall in front of a bunch of people.”
In eight years of hurdling, Tharp said he hasn’t fallen once.
He won his first Tennessee state title in eighth grade. After COVID-19 wiped out his high school freshman season, Tharp was seeded sixth at state as a sophomore and finished third.
“We had to go find his medal in the trash,” Sharif said.
Tharp re-dedicated himself.
“He really became obsessed with his technique and becoming the best hurdler that he could be,” Sharif said, “and now the best hurdler to ever do it.”
Tharp won the state title as a high school junior. He commemorated the championship with his first tattoo on the back of his right arm — a man walking up a set of stairs with the words “stay hungry.”
“At 15 years old, I told people I’d be the fastest hurdler in the world,” Tharp posted, reflecting one week after his world record. “I was running 14.2 and losing races, and EVERYBODY laughed. I can count on one hand, the amount of people who actually believed in me. But I stayed hungry.”
JA'KOBE THARP ARE YOU KIDDING ME 🤯 12.75
— NCAA Track & Field (@NCAATrackField) June 11, 2026
✅ NCAA RECORD
✅ WORLD RECORD#NCAATF x 🎥 ESPN / @AuburnTFXC pic.twitter.com/YuN7crt8kc
Around that time, Harnden, then an assistant at Tennessee, went all-in recruiting Tharp. He marveled at Tharp’s basketball highlights, dunking from just inside the free-throw line.
As for the hurdles, Harnden delivered Tharp a hard truth: your technique is trash.
“My senior year, I was U.S. number two,” Tharp said, “but (Harnden) was like, ‘You don’t know how to hurdle. We’re trying to build you from the ground up. Forget everything you’ve done up until this point.’”
Harnden was the only college coach to speak to Tharp like that. Tharp appreciated it. Harnden moved to Auburn, and Tharp followed.
Harnden soon became the courier for Tharp’s pre-race ritual that dates to high school: a McDonald’s order of two cheeseburgers, six-piece nuggets, large fry and milkshake.
“I have purchased that meal on three different continents,” Harnden said. “Well, actually, four different continents.”
In South America, Tharp won the hurdles at the 2024 World U20 Championships in Lima, Peru.
In Europe, Tharp made his Diamond League debut at age 19, placing third at the prestigious Herculis meet in Monaco in 2025.
Then in Asia, Tharp, tired from racing from January to September, placed sixth at the 2025 World Outdoor Championships in Tokyo. He was the first teenager to make an Olympic or world final in the event since the 1956 Helsinki Games, according to Olympedia and track stats website Tilastopaja.
This season has been different. Tharp didn’t begin training until mid-November and didn’t put spikes on until February.
He set a goal of going undefeated for the NCAA season -- check.
Tharp’s will to win reminds Harnden of Allen Johnson, the 1996 Olympic 110m hurdles gold medalist. Harnden and Johnson both ran for the University of North Carolina in the 1990s.
“No one’s outworking (Tharp), whether he feels good or not, whether it’s 5 a.m, in the weight room or it’s, like today, 102 degrees on the track,” Harnden said, “and people that gain confidence from work are super dangerous people.”
Harnden figured Tharp was capable of running in the 12.8s at NCAAs given 1) he ran 7.32 indoors in March, just five hundredths off Holloway’s 60m hurdles world record and 2) he clocked 13.05 into a headwind and while celebrating before the finish line at the SEC Championships in May.
Ja'Kobe called game ✌️
— Auburn Track & Field (@AuburnTFXC) May 16, 2026
Fastest time in the WORLD this year ✅
SEC Meet Record ✅
Track Record ✅
More to come...#WarEagle pic.twitter.com/aRe9opIjhp
After watching Merritt’s world record race from 2012 for motivation on a Tuesday, Tharp then broke Merritt’s record on a Wednesday (with Merritt, a coach for Texas State, mere feet away).
“The way (Tharp) was gapping everyone, it just was so reminiscent of when I did it,” said Merritt, who congratulated Tharp minutes later on the Hayward warm-up track.
Sharif watched it from trivia night at MJ’s Sports Bar and Grill in Murfreesboro.
“I was up running and screaming and letting everybody know that I coached that kid,” said Sharif, whom Tharp invited to join him at last year’s Bowerman Award (NCAA track and field athlete of the year) ceremony in Texas.
Tharp posed for photos and did interviews, then found his phone. He couldn’t open Instagram because it was overburdened. “I gained 10,000 followers in under two days,” he said.
He also heard from Holloway.
“He gave me advice on how to navigate this space now,” Tharp said, “because I’m now in a totally different space than I was right before NCAAs.”
Tharp announced Wednesday that he turned professional. He shares an apparel sponsor, Adidas, with Holloway.
After Tharp ran 12.75, Harnden told Merritt that he may have lost the world record, but he’ll always be an Olympic gold medalist.
That’s also reason for Tharp to stay hungry.
“You will be the world record holder, until somebody runs faster,” Harnden said, “but we are chasing titles and gold medals.”
