Auckland-born sprinter Eddie Osei-Nketia has rewritten the Australian all-conditions 100m record for the second time in a month, blasting through the line in 9.74 seconds at a college track meet in Lincoln, Nebraska.
The 25-year-old, who switched his international allegiance from New Zealand to Australia in December last year, completed a sprint double at the Big Ten Track and Field Championships, adding a 200m win in 20.03 seconds for good measure. Both performances were ruined for record purposes by enormous tailwinds, but the speed itself is the kind of number that rearranges the conversation about who is actually quickest in Oceania.
According to RNZ Sport, the wind gauge in Nebraska read plus 5.6 metres per second when Nketia powered down the straight, almost three times the two metres per second limit that World Athletics will accept as a legal mark. Had the air been still, the time would have demolished Patrick Johnson’s legal Australian national record of 9.93 seconds, which has stood since 2003. The 200m was run into an even more extreme draft, plus 7.5 metres per second, so that too was filed away in the all-conditions ledger rather than the formal record book.
Even with the asterisks, the times stand. The all-conditions record category exists precisely so that windy efforts can be counted somewhere, and 9.74 is now the fastest 100m run by an Australian sprinter under any conditions, regardless of wind, surface or altitude. Nketia already held the previous all-conditions mark of 9.84 set a month earlier in another over-the-limit race. He has therefore taken a tenth of a second off his own ceiling in four weeks.
“Lesss make it legal next time,” Nketia wrote on Instagram after the race, before adding a more measured assessment. “It’s crazy man, to run 9.74 even with the wind. It shows I’m getting better and can see the progress and the season isn’t over yet.”
The athletic backstory is one of the more tangled in Australasian sport. Eddie was born in Auckland in 2001 to Ghanaian parents and grew up on the Whangaparāoa Peninsula before his family relocated to Canberra in 2010 in search of better sporting and schooling opportunities. His father, Gus Nketia, is a former New Zealand 100m record holder whose mark of 10.11 from 1994 stood for nearly three decades. Gus is also Eddie’s coach. The young Nketia represented the Australian Capital Territory at junior level before moving back to Wellington as a teenager to finish at Scots College, where he committed to New Zealand in 2019 and promptly won the national 100m title.
That stint in the silver fern looked, for a while, like one of the most exciting things to happen to sprinting on this side of the Tasman in a generation. In 2022 he broke his father’s New Zealand 100m record in a heat at the World Athletics Championships in Eugene, clocking 10.08 into a slight headwind. The relationship with Athletics New Zealand soured, however, when he was left out of the Olympic team in 2021 and then again out of the Commonwealth Games team in 2022 despite times that, on paper, ranked him among the country’s best in any sprinting event.
He drifted out of the New Zealand programme, briefly chased an American football career as a wide receiver at the University of Hawaii, then accepted a track scholarship at the University of Southern California. A formal transfer of allegiance to Australia was completed on 4 December 2025, ending almost seven years inside the New Zealand high performance system. His younger brother Augustine Nketia Junior has also chosen Australia.
USC is now part of the reshaped Big Ten Conference following the 2024 American college sports realignment, which is why the Trojans were in Nebraska this past weekend rather than at a more familiar West Coast venue. The track at the University of Nebraska is known for being a fast surface, and Saturday’s conditions, while plainly unhelpful for record purposes, were ideal for putting on a show. Nketia did exactly that, winning both individual sprints and contributing to USC’s overall conference points haul.
The harder question, from a New Zealand point of view, is whether Athletics NZ now regrets the decisions that pushed its fastest ever sprinter across the Tasman. Nketia is now the country’s nearly man rather than its standard bearer, and the record he set in his father’s name at Eugene three years ago is starting to look like a footnote rather than a beginning. He turns 25 next week and is, by his own account, getting faster.
What comes next is a European campaign once the American collegiate season finishes in June, with Nketia hinting on Instagram that he wants to chase a legal sub-ten time on the Diamond League circuit. If the wind ever drops while he is running this well, the Australian record book will need a fresh page rather than another asterisk. The Commonwealth Games in Glasgow next year and the 2028 Los Angeles Olympics are both clearly in his sights, and both will be contested in green and gold rather than black.
The 100m and 200m double in Lincoln may well end up as the moment Australian sprinting realised it had inherited a genuine global contender. New Zealand fans are left to watch and wonder.
Did Athletics NZ get this wrong, or was the Nketia split always going to happen? Tell us in the comments.
This article was written by AI, briefed to report the facts, hopefully without some of the bias people bring to the job 🙂
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