The clock does not lie, and this season it has told the same story again and again: Busang Collen Kebinatshipi, running one lap of the track, has become a problem the rest of the world cannot solve.
The latest proof arrived in Budapest, where the reigning world champion did something he had spent most of the year resisting the urge to do. He ran without restraint. Off the blocks he detonated, splitting 100 meters in 10.61, flashing through 200 in 20.67, and tearing past 300 in a scarcely believable 31.37, by which point a field stacked with global medalists had already been reduced to spectators. When he crossed the line in 43.39 seconds – another Botswana national record – he had beaten Rai Benjamin by three-quarters of a second, an eternity in a discipline often decided by the thickness of a vest.
The time moved him to fifth on the all-time list, into the rarefied company of men who have redrawn the boundaries of the event. The win handed him the inaugural Ultimate Championship crown and a $150,000 payday. And then, having given the track everything, he gave it a little more. Moments after finishing, Kebinatshipi blacked out and was wheeled off to recover.
“It’s normal,” he said afterward, with the shrug of a man describing weather. “I know every time I push my body, it’s like that. The plan was to give everything, leave everything on the track.”
He has made a habit of it. Unbeaten over 400 meters all season – six for six on the Diamond League circuit, three national records, a Diamond League Final victory in Brussels – Kebinatshipi has not simply won. He has dominated, which is a different and lonelier achievement. Now the sport has taken formal notice. He is among the 20 athletes nominated for the 2026 World Athlete of the Year, with the winner to be crowned in Monaco on November 29. Finalists are announced in mid-November. For a nation of just over two million, the mere nomination is a kind of national holiday.
Ask the man himself where this is going, and he does not hedge.
“Trust me,” he said in Budapest. “This was just the start of an era of Collen. My plan is just to dominate for the longest period possible.”
The slow build behind a sudden rise
It is a bold sentence, but Kebinatshipi has earned the right to it. The ascent only looks sudden. He took up athletics in primary school – “I was just doing it for fun” – and in 2019 crossed paths with the coach who would reshape his life, Chilume “Chippa” Ntshwarang. A year later, the two made the decision that would define everything: to commit to the 400, an event so punishing that athletes speak of it the way sailors speak of rounding Cape Horn.
“Even though I was scared of it,” Kebinatshipi admitted, “coach maybe saw something I didn’t see.”
What the coach saw revealed itself in stages. A personal best of 45.40 at 18. African U20 gold in 2023. An Olympic debut in Paris in 2024, where he narrowly missed the individual final but helped Botswana to 4×400 silver. Then, in 2025, the machinery clicked into gear. After stumbling in his opening heat in Tokyo, he answered with a national record in the semifinal and a 43.53 in the final to claim his first world title – the race that opened the doors he has since been kicking off their hinges.
“Last year’s win opened a lot of doors for me, but that was just the beginning,” he said, “because this year was about putting my name up there and showing people who I am and what I’m capable of.”
A race run at the edge of chemistry
Here is where the story turns from biography to physics. The 400 meters is often called the hardest event in track and field, and the reason is chemistry: it is run almost entirely in oxygen debt. The body cannot supply fuel fast enough, so it borrows against itself, flooding the muscles with lactate and leaving the final 100 meters a sprint through quicksand. Kebinatshipi’s Budapest collapse was not weakness; it was the receipt for a race run exactly at the limit of what human biochemistry allows. The great quarter-milers are the ones who distribute the agony most intelligently – who spend their nervous system like a gambler who has memorized the odds.
Which is why his talk of the world record is not idle. Wayde van Niekerk’s 43.03, set in Rio in 2016, has stood as one of the sport’s most intimidating marks. Kebinatshipi, careful not to overpromise, has nonetheless done the arithmetic out loud.
“The calculations based on training, we’re always doing – like if I go 20.9 in the first 200 and then go 22.0 or 22.1, it’s going to give us a 42.9,” he said. The record talk, he suggested, properly belongs on the table at the 2028 Los Angeles Olympics. “I’m still a bit lighter, I’m not doing a lot of gym, but as time goes, when I start engaging the body in more constant work, I think I will manage it. But for now, no pressure.”
No pressure, and no ceiling either. He believes he has “10, 11 years in this track life,” and he is already sketching the map beyond the 400. Dip under 43, he reasons, and the 200 becomes the next frontier; conquer that, and the 800 beckons. It is the itinerary of a man who intends to leave very little of the sport unvisited.
Home, dogs and a dynasty in the making
For now, though, the era of Collen will pause for rest. His season complete, Kebinatshipi is headed home to his 10-acre farm in Botswana, where he breeds boerboel dogs and plans, in his words, to spend all his prize money on them. He has eight, and he has missed them since May.
“Unfortunately, they are not as fast as I am,” he said. “They have big muscles and cannot keep up with me.”
Neither, this season, could anyone else. He is 22. He is unbeaten. He is world champion, Ultimate champion, and now a candidate for the sport’s highest individual honor. And he is telling anyone who will listen that the dominance is only beginning.
Whatever way he goes – 400, 200, 800, or the record books themselves – the era of Collen Kebinatshipi looks built to last.
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