* Games will host a treat of speed as three of the four fastest 400m hurdlers ever go head-to-head

In 2016, Karsten Warholm was just settling into his first full year as a 400m hurdles specialist. Rai Benjamin, at 18 and two years Warholm’s junior, had just wrapped up his first year of NCAA competition. As for Qatar’s Abderrahman Samba, he had not even run the event competitively.
In Tokyo they’ll co-star in one of the Games’ most eagerly awaited showdowns as three of the four fastest 400m hurdlers of all-time.
Samba was the first man after the then world record holder Kevin Young to have dipped under the 47-second barrier when he stormed to 46.98 at Paris in 2018.
The future looked fast, especially when the Qatari said after the blitz, “It definitely did not feel like an under-47-second race today. I made a small mistake at the start, lost my balance on the first hurdle, so I did not expect to run so fast.”
For Warholm, it was a pursuit and the Norwegian was ready. “He runs extremely good. Now he’s the best and I’m just second and that counts for nothing, I guess. So I’ll try to chase him,” Warholm, the world champion in London, had said.
An injury slowed Samba in 2019 but he regrouped enough to take bronze on home soil at the World Championships, even as Warholm retained the world title ahead of Benjamin.
In the Qatari capital, Warholm had held off Benjamin for the second time in two back-to-back meetings. The set-up came in Zurich when the pair met for the first time, a clash that would witness two men breaking 47 seconds in the same race for the first time, Warholm’s sizzling 46.92 to Benjamin’s 46.98.
Benjamin took it easy in 2020 but Warholm didn’t, improving further to 46.87 in Stockholm, then the second fastest performance of all-time and just inches shy of the 46.78 world record Kevin Young set at the 1992 Olympic Games - almost four years before Warholm was born.
In 2021, Warholm went even faster in his very first race of the season, blazing to a 46.70 performance in Oslo on July 1 to finally eclipse Young’s legendary performance.
That was at least in part a reaction to Benjamin’s stunning run at the US Olympic Trials just four days earlier, a 46.83 sizzler that moved him past Warholm, albeit briefly, into the No.2 spot all-time.
Samba, meanwhile, had taken 2020 off and arrived in Tokyo with a 48.26 season’s best. In the semi-final on Sunday, he improved to 47.47 even as he appeared to conserve energy towards the end finishing behind Brazilian Alison Dos Santos (47.31). In the first semi-final, Warholm’s 47.30 edged out Benjamin’s 47.37.
Others expected to be in the medal chase include Kyron McMaster, the fourth-place finisher in Doha, and Turkey’s Yasmani Copello, a finalist at the last three World Championships and the silver medallist in 2017.