At 43.39 seconds, there was barely enough time for the crowd in Budapest to process what Collen Kebinatshipi had done. The 22-year-old Botswana sprinter had just won the inaugural men’s 400m title at the World Athletics Ultimate Championship, lowered his own national record and moved into a rarefied section of athletics history. Only four men have ever run the distance faster: Wayde van Niekerk, Michael Johnson, Butch Reynolds and Nigeria’s Samuel Ogazi.
Kebinatshipi’s performance was particularly striking because the 43.39 was not simply another championship-winning time. It represented a substantial progression from the 43.53 national record with which he won the 400m world title in Tokyo in 2025. In Budapest, he produced a run that placed him fifth on the all-time outdoor list, while extending a remarkable rise that has taken him from a promising junior relay runner to one of the most formidable quarter-milers in the world.
His trajectory has been unusually fast. Kebinatshipi was part of Botswana’s victorious 4x400m relay team at the 2021 World U20 Championships before establishing himself individually on the international circuit. By 2023, he was already competing at the senior World Championships. Two years later, he arrived in Tokyo and won Botswana’s first men’s 400m world title, running 43.53 in the final after recording 43.61 in the semi-final. The victory announced him as a champion. The 2026 season has begun to establish something more ambitious: his place among the very fastest men ever to run one lap of a track.
There is another dimension to his rise that makes the story distinctly Botswana. Kebinatshipi belongs to a generation of athletes helping to turn the southern African nation into a serious sprinting presence. Botswana already has Olympic and world-level pedigree through athletes such as Letsile Tebogo, while its relay programme has also become increasingly competitive. In May 2026, Botswana’s men’s 4x400m team won gold at the World Athletics Relays in Gaborone with a championship and national record of 2:54.47, placing the country third on the world all-time list. Kebinatshipi ran the anchor leg.
His individual range is equally revealing. In 2026, Kebinatshipi became only the fourth man in history to break both 10 seconds for 100m and 44 seconds for 400m, joining an extraordinary group consisting of Van Niekerk, Michael Norman and Fred Kerley. He ran 9.89 seconds at the Botswana Championships in April, demonstrating that his speed is not confined to the demanding final 200 metres of the 400m. That combination of raw speed and endurance is precisely what makes his 43-second performances so significant.
Yet the 43.39 also changes the conversation around what might come next. Van Niekerk’s world record of 43.03 has stood since the 2016 Rio Olympics, with Johnson’s 43.18 and Reynolds’ 43.29 still occupying the next two positions on the all-time list. Kebinatshipi is now only 0.36 seconds away from the world record, a margin that sounds small until one remembers how brutally competitive the final hundred metres of a 400m can be. For a 22-year-old already operating at this level, however, the record is no longer an abstract piece of history. It is a visible target.
Kebinatshipi’s ascent is part of a new African sprint narrative in which athletes from nations outside the traditional power centres are increasingly occupying the centre of the sport. His 43.39 has given Botswana another name to place alongside its growing generation of global track stars, while giving the 400m a new challenger with both the youth and speed to reshape its hierarchy. At 22, Kebinatshipi is already a world champion, an Ultimate champion and the fifth-fastest 400m runner in history. The more interesting question now is how much faster he can go.
