Former Idaho track star wins U.S. title. Up next? World Championships in Japan
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- Lexy Halladay-Lowry won the U.S. steeplechase title in her Nike pro debut.
- Victory secured Halladay-Lowry a spot on Team USA for the 2025 World Championships.
- Idaho athletes posted strong results, including a T44 world record by Annie Carey.
All Lexy Halladay-Lowry needed was the sign. And once she got it, she left the pack in the dust and cruised to a national title at the U.S. Track and Field Outdoor Championships in Eugene, Oregon.
The 2020 Mountain View High grad roared as she crossed the finish line Saturday in the women’s 3,000-meter steeplechase in 9 minutes, 9.14 seconds. She edged the second-place finisher, North Carolina State’s Angelina Napoleon, by 1.82 seconds to punch her ticket to Tokyo for the 2025 World Athletics Championships in September.
“I like to win. I really like to win,” Halladay-Lowry told reporters in a postrace interview. “Coming in second my past two NCAAs — outdoor and indoor — it’s super sweet. It’s super satisfying.
“The whole time, this is what we’ve been training for. To be able to do it on this stage, I’m very happy with it.”
Saturday marked her first race after signing with Nike, and she didn’t let her first outing as a Nike pro athlete go to waste.
She hung in the top four for the first 2,000 meters before making her move in the final two laps. She blew past Napoleon on the outside on the corner, then slowly and steadily added to her lead until she finished 20 meters ahead of her top challenger at the finish line.
Halladay-Lowry said she and her coach, Diljeet Taylor, weighed several pre-race strategies. But after watching the pack break out to a quick early pace, the former BYU runner laid in wait until Taylor gave her a pair of finger guns just after she took the lead.
“When I saw that, I took it and didn’t look back,” Halladay-Lowry said.
The national championship guarantees Halladay-Lowry a spot at the World Championships, where the former Idaho standout leads a young American team as a first-time qualifier. The women’s steeplechase preliminaries begin Sept. 15 with the finals to follow on Sept. 17.
“We are sending a super, super gritty team,” Halladay-Lowry said. “Yes, we’ll be young. But it’ll be a great experience and we’ll get to go and do it together. How exciting.”
Halladay-Lowry graduated from Mountain View as one of the state’s most decorated runners of all time, winning five all-class Gatorade athlete of the year awards between track and cross country.
She finished her career with six state track titles in three seasons before losing her senior year to the coronavirus. She also captured three cross country state titles in four tries.
OSTRANDER SCRATCHES FROM FINAL
Boise State alum Allie Ostrander also qualified for the women’s steeplechase finals but was a late scratch. She posted on her Instagram page that she was mentally exhausted after rehabbing from a surgery at the end of 2024 and a March injury.
“By the time I got to the US final, there was nothing left to scrape,” Ostrander wrote. “I felt completely empty. I wasn’t nervous, excited, anxious, unsure, or scared, just devoid of emotion.
“Racing is one of the most exciting parts of my life so to have it elicit zero emotion was, frankly, terrifying. That coupled with some small health concerns was enough to make me certain that racing wasn’t the right choice for my body or mind.”
BORAH’S GREEN FINISHES 8TH
Borah grad Nathan Green (2021) recorded two of the three fastest times in his career at the U.S. Track and Field Outdoor Championships. But a loaded men’s 1,500-meter field pushed the former Idaho track star to an eighth-place finish Saturday.
Green finished the highly contested race in 3:33.25 — 3.8 seconds behind Saturday’s winner, Jonah Koech.
The performance marked his second top-10 performance at the USATF Outdoor Championships. He finished seventh in the 1,500 in 2023.
CAREY SETS WORLD RECORD
Bishop Kelly grad Annie Carey (2023) set a world record with a long jump of 5.19 meters (17 feet, 0.5 inches) in the T44 category at the Para National Championships on Saturday.
The T44 category includes athletes with a lower-leg impairment on one side. Carey, who was born with a club foot, previously set the Paralympics category record (4.96 meters) in Paris last year.
Carey finished second at the national championships in a mixed-category event. She will begin her junior season at Mount St. Mary, a Division I program in Maryland, this fall.
This story was originally published August 4, 2025 at 3:14 PM.
