American Rai Benjamin wins elusive Olympic gold in 400 hurdles

SAINT-DENIS, France — 

Among the Big Three who have spent the last three years revolutionizing the 400-meter hurdles, Rai Benjamin has often been relegated to the forgotten man.

A native New Yorker who has made Los Angeles home since 2015, Benjamin didn’t have an Olympic gold medal like Norwegian Karsten Warholm, who won in Tokyo in a world-record performance. And he couldn’t boast a world title to rival that of Brazilian Alison Dos Santos, whose breakthrough came in 2022.

Instead, what Benjamin had was the unenviable position of owning three of the five-fastest times in history, including the No. 2 mark of 46.17 from the Tokyo Olympics, and having only silver and bronze to show for it.

No longer.

Benjamin won his first global gold medal Friday on Stade de France’s rain-soaked purple track, pulling away from his rivals over the final three hurdles to win the gold medal at the Paris Olympics in 46.46 seconds.

Warholm was second in 47.06, with Dos Santos earning bronze in 47.26.

Benjamin smiled while leaning at the finish line, then ran over to fans wearing white T-shirts bearing the saying “RAI VS. THE WORLD.” Benjamin did not scream, and did not break down in emotion. The celebration was measured for a reason: Despite years of playing the bridesmaid, the outcome was less a surprise to Benjamin than a confirmation of the belief he’d protected for years.

Edwin Moses, the godfather of 400-meter hurdling, once theorized that the 10-hurdle race presented 31 moments for potential failure, beginning with the start and including every takeoff, flight and landing over all 10 hurdles. In previous years even when Benjamin had passed that test, Warholm and Dos Santos had done it better in world-historic ways. But as hurdlers from Estonia and Jamaica toppled over the final hurdle, Benjamin cruised.

Benjamin, 27, initially ran for UCLA before later breaking the NCAA record while competing for USC. Under his longtime coach Joanna Hayes — the former USC assistant and 2004 Olympic gold medalist in the 100-meter hurdles who was hired in June as UCLA’s head track coach — Benjamin became, at least in his opinion, the fastest of the trio of top hurdlers. In June, he won the U.S. track and field trials in a world-leading 46.46, and only Benjamin and Warholm had run under 47 seconds on multiple occasions this season, though Dos Santos was only one-hundredth of a second from joining them.

“That tells me the gaps between us are very small,” Warholm said after the first round of Olympic qualifying.

If any of those three had been born in a different era, they may have laid sole claim to the title as the best ever. Instead, their overlap helped break Kevin Young’s 1992 world record and created one of track’s strongest rivalries as they beat up on one another. Benjamin entered Friday’s final 3-5 against Warholm and 8-2 vs. Dos Santos.

Said Dos Santos: “You cannot relax. No one is thinking, ‘I already have the medal.’ ”

Benjamin left his semifinal “confident, but I’ve got to do it when it counts.”

In the final, time no longer mattered.

“The gold medal has been elusive to me this whole time,” he said.

Not anymore.