Jefferson-Wooden, Bednarek complete Ultimate Championship sprint doubles

What the report says

American sprinters Melissa Jefferson-Wooden and Kenneth Bednarek closed the World Athletics Ultimate Championship in Budapest with rare sprint doubles, winning both the 100m and 200m finals over the weekend. Al Jazeera reported that the meet also crowned inaugural Ultimate Champions and awarded each winner $150,000 in prize money, underscoring the event’s unusually large financial stakes for track and field.

Bednarek won the men’s 100m in 9.85 seconds and followed with a 200m victory in 19.52, a world-leading time for the season. He finished ahead of Botswana’s Letsile Tebogo and fellow American Courtney Lindsey in the 200m, while Jamaican world champion Oblique Seville and American Ronnie Baker were among the podium finishers in the 100m. Jefferson-Wooden matched the feat by taking the women’s 100m in 10.62 and the 200m in 21.47, both among the fastest times in the world this year. She beat Olympic champion Julien Alfred and Sha’Carri Richardson in the 100m, and held off Gabrielle Thomas and Kayla White in the 200m.

The rest of the Budapest program featured several other notable winners, including Jamaica’s Jasmine Jones in the women’s 400m hurdles, Sri Lanka’s Rumesh Pathirage in the javelin, and Norway’s Jakob Ingebrigtsen in the men’s 5,000m. More broadly, the results highlighted how the new championship format is pairing elite competition with significant prize money, giving the season-ending meet added visibility and competitive weight.