By John Frierson
Staff Writer

If you’re an elite track and field athlete in the United States, you’ve competed at Oregon’s Hayward Field. And because you’re often competing against the best of the best at the legendary track, whether it’s during the NCAA Outdoor Championships, the U.S. Championships or Olympic Trials, nearly everyone who competes there endures their share of heartbreak.

For Kyle Garland, Hayward Field was until this summer a place where little had gone as well as he would have hoped. The former Georgia multi-events star and collegiate decathlon record holder placed second at the NCAAs in 2023, despite posting the No. 3 all-time collegiate score over the 10 events. At the 2024 Olympic Trials in Eugene, Garland’s quest to make his first Olympic team ended after the pole vault due to a serious ankle injury.

So when the 2025 USA Track and Field Outdoor Championships began on July 31, you could understand if Garland, as talented as any American decathlete since Ashton Eaton, the two-time Olympic gold medalist and former world record-holder, was dominating the sport in the 2010s, had some trepidation about competing at Hayward. But Garland went the opposite route and took home the national championship, earning a spot on the U.S. team at next month’s World Athletics Championships in Tokyo.

“I was in a really good headspace going into the competition,” said Garland, who won the NCAA Indoor title in the heptathlon in 2023 and multiple SEC championships in the multis. “I was really confident, extremely confident, and my mind was in the best place it had been.”

Garland said his mind was in a good place because he stopped putting so much pressure on himself to win.

“It’s just super stress-free,” he said of his approach. “Every meet is just another meet, another opportunity for me to do the sport that I love to do. My body was feeling great, and my mind was even in a better spot.”

As Georgia assistant coach Ryan Baily put it, Garland decided the best thing he can do to bring out his best on the biggest stages is just go out there and have fun. And the approach has worked.

At the U.S. Outdoor Championships, Garland set personal bests in five of the 10 events, won six events, and finished with 8,869 points, 462 ahead of second place. It was the 10th-best decathlon score ever.

“He’s very gifted,” said Baily, Georgia’s multi-events, pole vault and jumps coach, who has worked with Garland for several years. “God gave him a lot, and he’s just insanely talented and elastic. He does stuff that I don’t know if anyone in the world at this point can do. … He just needs to go out there and have fun, and you see the results when he does that.”

Garland is one of numerous former or current Bulldogs that will be in action at the World Championships, and Caryl Smith Gilbert, Georgia’s Director of Track and Field, who led the Georgia women to the NCAA Outdoor national championship in June, will be the head coach of the U.S. women’s team.

Smith Gilbert said it means a lot for the program to have Bulldogs like Garland, Aaliyah Butler (400 meters) and Christopher Morales Williams (400 meters) representing Georgia in the biggest meet of the year.

“I think it’s a testament to the way we build the team,” Smith Gilbert said. “When you come here, you have something left in you to be great — a lot left in you. We train them to be able to go to this stage.”

Going into a grueling 10-event competition like the decathlon, it sounds easy to just approach it with a “just have fun” attitude. But when you work as hard as Garland does, training all year for maybe three or four competitions, the stakes are always high.

“We’re thinking of energy distribution through 10 events,” Baily said. “And if you’re stressed and carry a lot of emotion in a negative way, it just drains the heck out of you. If you can learn to eliminate most of that noise, those 10 events aren’t as bad.”

Garland, 25 years old and entering his decathlon prime, now heads to the World Championships as happy and confident as he’s ever been. 

“I know what my body is capable of when I just take a clear mind,” he said. “Whereas in past years I would have one really good meet sometime in the middle of the season and then just kind of fall off later, I feel like now, each meet for me, I’m just stacking on, stacking on, to just bring more and more, so that the last meet of the season is my best one rather than my worst.”

Garland heads into the World Championships ranked No. 7 in the world. Another former Bulldog, Johannes Erm, the NCAA decathlon champion in 2019, is ranked No. 3. Karel Tilga, who won the 2021 NCAA decathlon for Georgia, is No. 17.

“It’s going to be good to compete against those guys,” Garland said. “We’re all going to be fighting for a medal. Knowing that I have good relationships with them, and a lot of the guys I’m competing with, it makes it fun. It turns it back into another game, rather than just fighting to beat the opponent.”

Assistant Sports Communications Director John Frierson is the staff writer for the UGA Athletic Association and curator of the ITA Men’s Tennis Hall of Fame. You can find his work at: Frierson Files.