Dalilah Muhammad Set to Close Out Hall-of-Worthy 400m Hurdles Career in Budapest

Olympic champion Dalilah Muhammad confirmed she will bring her track career to a close at this weekend’s World Athletics Ultimate Championship in Budapest, telling broadcaster Lewis Johnson on the eve of competition that “this is it.”

The 36-year-old American will contest the women’s 400m hurdles, with semifinals scheduled for Saturday and the final on Sunday. Coverage airs live on NBC Sports and Peacock, both part of Comcast‘s media portfolio — a company whose shares traded at $25.05 recently, up 1.62% from a prior close of $24.65, valuing the telecom and media giant at roughly $92.5 billion.

The inaugural Ultimate Championship is a new biennial event from World Athletics, running Sept. 11–13. It consolidates the sport’s top performers — 2024 Olympic gold medalists, 2025 world champions and other highest-ranked athletes — into a compressed three-day program. Distances of 800m and shorter feature semifinals and finals, while all other events go straight to finals.

The financial stakes are unprecedented for the sport: individual winners collect $150,000 from a total prize pool of $10 million, which World Athletics bills as the richest in track and field history.

Muhammad said the new championship was a major factor in her decision to compete one more year after initially indicating 2025 would be her final season. “I love to see our sport growing and doing so much more,” she said.

She enters ranked fifth in the world this year by best time at 53.16 seconds, trailing world leader and fellow American Anna Cockrell by 1.03 seconds.

Muhammad’s resume includes 2016 Olympic gold in the 400m hurdles, the 2019 world title, and world-record performances at both the 2019 USATF Outdoor Championships and the 2019 World Championships. She reflected that the 2016 gold was never the expectation: “I just wanted to make it as a 400m hurdler.”

What to watch

• Muhammad’s semifinal on Saturday and the 400m hurdles final on Sunday, broadcast on NBC Sports and Peacock.
• Whether her season best of 53.16 can close the 1.03-second gap to world leader Anna Cockrell.
• Americans’ results across the inaugural $10 million championship, which may shape the event’s profile on the global calendar.

Source: original release