Edoardo Scotti’s 45.21-second run in the 400m at the Wanda Diamond League meeting in Rome last year was more than just a PB.

For many elite athletes, pain is a constant companion. Whether it’s on the track, in the gym or on the treatment table, their capacity to endure is typically off the charts. Yet there’s a good kind of pain and a bad kind of pain, and over the past 18 months Cynthia Bolingo has endured all too much of the latter.

Twenty years ago today, the Sydney Olympic Games enraptured the world with what is widely regarded as one of the most thrilling nights in athletics history.

Wayde van Niekerk was nervous. For an athlete of his calibre, an unofficial 100m race on grass in mid-February should have been a formality. A routine rust-buster. A glorified training session.

It may be slightly incorrect to say Wadeline Jonathas could have been lost to the sport but she certainly may never have been found were it not for the intuition of a high school track coach.

Standing on the start line at the 2017 Drake Relays, it felt like any other race for Kirani James.

Our end-of-year reviews conclude with renowned statisticians A. Lennart Julin and Mirko Jalava taking a look back at 2019’s key action in the sprints.

Rising Colombian star Anthony Zambrano produced a major surprise at the World Athletics Championships Doha 2019 last month when he raced to 400m silver. The 21-year-old clocked a notable 44.15 to clip a hefty 0.14 from the South American record set by Brazil’s Sanderlei Claro Parrela at the 1999 World Championships in Seville when Zambrano was barely a year old.

A little over a month after Hurricane Dorian wreaked devastation in his homeland of The Bahamas, Steven Gardiner lifted the spirits of his compatriots to climb sixth on the all-lists with a rip-roaring victory.

On 24 July 1952 at the Olympic Games in Helsinki, Czechoslovakia’s Emil Zátopek kicked away from the field in the final 150 metres to take gold in the 5000m. An hour later, his wife Dana Zátopková matched his achievement by winning the Olympic title in the javelin to complete a husband-wife medal double on the same day.

When Salwa Eid Naser overturned expectations of the women’s 400m final at the IAAF World Athletics Championships Doha 2019, she evoked the memories of races past.

At the age of 21, Salwa Eid Naser of Bahrain became the third fastest female 400m runner in history tonight as she earned gold in 48.14 – almost a full second swifter than her previous best of 49.08.