Alison dos Santos capped an extraordinary season with 400m hurdles gold at the Ultimate Championship in Budapest, moving ever closer to matching Adhemar Ferreira da Silva and Joaquim Cruz as the greatest Brazilian track and field athlete in history.

Alison dos Santos continued the finest season of his career by winning the 400m hurdles at the World Athletics Ultimate Championship in Budapest on Sunday (Sept 13), a performance that puts the Brazilian in ever-closer contention with 1952 and 1956 Olympic triple jump champion Adhemar Ferreira da Silva and 1984 Olympic 800m winner Joaquim Cruz for the title of his country's greatest ever track and field athlete.

The world record-holder clocked 45.98 to become Ultimate champion, the third-fastest performance in history, striding away from the USA's world and Olympic champion Rai Benjamin approaching the final barrier.

Benjamin, competing in only his third hurdles race of the season, still ran 46.40 for silver – his second runner-up finish of the Budapest weekend, having also been beaten into second in the flat 400m to complete an unusual double across the two events. Norway's Karsten Warholm, the man whose world record Dos Santos took down last month, claimed bronze in 46.78, ahead of Germany's Emil Agyekum, who smashed his own national record with 47.10 in fourth.

It capped a remarkable few months for the 26-year-old, who arrived in Budapest as the outstanding 400m hurdler of the year. At the Weltklasse Zürich in August, he ran 45.80 to become the first man under 46 seconds and take down Warholm's world record of 45.94, set when the Norwegian won Olympic gold in Tokyo in 2021. He backed that up by winning the Diamond League Final in Brussels in a meeting record, his third Diamond League title in four years (2022, 2024 and now 2026), before adding the Ultimate crown to his season's collection in Budapest.

Those achievements sit alongside a résumé that already includes world gold in Eugene in 2022, world silver in Tokyo last year, and Olympic bronze at both Tokyo 2020 and Paris 2024.

Dos Santos cannot yet claim to have matched either Da Silva's or Cruz's medal collection, but the breadth of what he has now achieved – a world record, a world title, multiple Olympic medals, three Diamond League Finals and now an Ultimate Championship crown, all before his 27th birthday – means the conversation about Brazil's greatest ever athlete increasingly has to include his name.

For now, though, the immediate business was seeing off Benjamin, whose own achievements this season and beyond leave him firmly established as Dos Santos's fiercest rival. The pair have now traded the sport's biggest 400m hurdles titles for the best part of a decade, with Warholm making it a genuine three-way rivalry that has repeatedly rewritten the record books.

Agyekum's run in fourth, meanwhile, was the standout performance further down the field – a national record that suggests the European runner-up from Birmingham has more to offer as he continues to close the gap on the sport's leading trio.

Jasmine Jones wins women's 400m hurdles as Muhammad bows out

Jasmine Jones finally landed the first major international title of her career, winning the women's 400m hurdles in a season's best of 52.45 – reward for a season that had already brought her agonisingly close, with fourth at the Paris Olympics and silver at last year's World Championships in Tokyo.

Diamond League champion Anna Cockrell led for the first half of the race, with European champion Emma Zapletalova and Jones in pursuit, but as the staggered start unwound into the home straight it was Jones who carried the best momentum, moving through to win as Cockrell faded. Zapletalova came through for second in 52.68 – her seventh sub-53-second run of the year – with Cockrell holding on for third in 53.09, just two hundredths of a second ahead of Dalilah Muhammad, contesting the final race of her career.

It capped a rapid rise in form for Jones, who had won only one 400m hurdles race all year before Budapest, at the Istvan Gyulai Memorial in this same stadium, and had shown signs of what was to come with a season's best of 52.77 in Saturday's semi-final.

"This is wild and I didn't see that coming," Jones said. "Coming off Dalilah's last race, she inspired me so much growing up as a 400m hurdler. Having Dalilah and Emma, who has had such a breakout season, alongside me and competing with them in this brand new championship was so much fun."

For Muhammad, the 2016 Olympic and 2019 world champion and a former world record-holder, the occasion prompted reflection on a career at the top of the event for the best part of a decade. "It never really hits you until you finish your career and see what you have accomplished," she said. "I had a really blessed career and I'm really grateful for it."