Track athletes who had only ONE great season

Five track athletes and runners who had one great season only never to produce that kind of form again. Featuring: Alex Kipchirchir, Derrick Atkins, Pamela Jelimo, Yulia Nesterenko and Boniface Tumuti.

Images: PA archive free to use
Clips: Credited within video

Twitter / Instagram: @journowillmata

(Some of the script)

Sherone Simpson. Olympic Champion over the 200m. Sprinting legend. These are both things we would be saying had the Olympics been held in 2006.
Athletics is a cruel sport in many ways, but one which is often overlooked about the unfairness of the whole thing is the ability for an athlete to hit the form of their life in the wrong year. Simpson has been Olympic silver medalist and has multiple titles in the all-conquering Jamaican 4x100m team. But unfortunately, she happened to hit her peak and set her 100m and 200m personal bests in a year when all she had to compete for was the Commonwealth Games title and what was then called the World Cup. Simpson won both those titles, beating quality athletes such as Veronica Campbell and Torri Edwards on the way. She clocked the best time in the world over the 100m and 200m that year and surely would have been a world champion if only there had been a world championship…
Simpson is not alone in suffering this misfortune. But she is also one of many athletes to have produced world beating form for one year and one year only. Over the years, athletics has produced a fair amount of amazingly talented athletes who have gone onto become household names, but have ultimately retired with little silverware to show for it. Others have had the season of their lives right when it counted and were either never seen again or never again produced that kind of form.
This can be down to a wide number of reasons, injury, lack of funding, transfer of allegiance, disinterest in athletics, opportunities to play American soccer - or whatever you call that game.
Many have shown flashes of brilliance around their peak year but widely, not been as competitive before or again. But there are a few who have shown only one year at the level they will be remembered for.
And, we are not talking about athletes who have seemingly come out of nowhere, won a major title and then failed a drug test only to never be seen again…
These are runners - and they are actually all runners, I could not think of a good field example - who are the athletics equivalent of a one hit wonder.
Before I dive into the list, I would like to thank… you all for watching, and remember if you liked this video...then that’s great, I hope you’re having a great day.
I am amazed, doing this research, to see that Yulia Nesterenko did any running in years other than 2004.
I was wondering if she had not only had never stepped on track again after the Athens Olympics - but just never run again. Just walked everywhere for the rest of her life. Even if she saw she was about to miss a train she wouldn’t even break into a jog and just say, no I’m done with that.
Nesterenko, also known as Nestsiarenka depending on where you’ve seen her name written down, really seemed to come out of nowhere to win Olympic gold in 2004. Her season’s best in 2003 was a 11.45 clocking at the prestigious Minsk Cup.
I was making out the 2004 Olympics were her peak, but the Minsk Cup…
Looking at her palmaires, Nesterenko was weirdly in races that I actually watched - yet I seem to have completely blanked her from my memory. She did, for instance, reach the world final in 2005 - albeit coming in eighth - and the European final a year later. She even reached the semis in Beijing 2008, which suggests that her pedigree was better than my memory of her.
But Nesterenko will to any athletics fan be a quirk. She won the Olympic gold in 2004 in a time of 10.93 - defeating…
Lauryn Williams, the 2005 world champion.
Veronica Campbell, the just about everything else champion.
Ivet Lalova, who, let’s not forget, was really quick that year.
And, (dramatic music)
Sherone Simpson
Nesterenko never came close to emulating her 2004 form in any other year. There was never another global title, nor even a medal. Her name was out of the conversation almost as soon as it arrived there.
I’m not naive enough to know there are...peculiarities around these performances, especially in the Olympic year and the track record of Russia and former Soviet countries.
But as far as I am aware there has been no proof of foul play and Nesterenko is very much an Olympic champion… and a worthy winner of the 2003 Minsk Cup.
The men’s 400m hurdles is now in a golden era. The world record has been broken on more than one occasion in 2020 and Karsten Warholm produced the performance of the Olympics in running an unimaginable sub-46 second lap with barriers. But what a difference one, admittedly quite long, Olympic cycle can make.