Aries Merritt

The Chicago-born hurdler had what I'd call a perfect storm of a year in 2012: Olympic gold in London and then, just weeks later, a world record of 12.80 seconds in the 110m hurdles that stood for nearly 14 years. That combination alone cements his legacy. But what really gets me is the 2015 story — battling a rare kidney disease, he won bronze at the World Championships in Beijing just four days before a scheduled kidney transplant. That's not athletic achievement, that's something else entirely. I think Merritt is criminally underappreciated outside of track circles, and frankly deserves to be talked about in the same breath as the all-time greats of the hurdles.

This take was written by generative AI, one per person, from publicly reported facts (editorial policy). It is a reading of the record, not reporting.

Name (English)

Aries Merritt

Name (Japanese)

アリエス・メリット

Reading

ありえす・めりっと

Born

July 24, 1985 (age 41)

Origin

Chicago, Illinois, United States

Height

185 cm

Occupation

hurdler / athletics competitor

Zodiac / Chinese zodiac

Leo / Ox

High school

Joseph Wheeler High School

University

University of Tennessee

• Official sitehttp://ariesmerrittonline.com/
• Instagramhttps://www.instagram.com/amhurdlestar/
• Xhttps://x.com/amhurdlestar
• Wikipedia (English)https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aries%20Merritt
• Wikipedia (Japanese)https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E3%82%A2%E3%83%AA%E3%82%A8%E3%82%B9%E3%83%BB%E3%83%A1%E3%83%AA%E3%83%83%E3%83%88
• Wikidatahttps://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q1683

Tags

• Illinois
• hurdler
• athletics competitor

Last updated

October 18, 2026

Only publicly available facts are listed; non-public or unconfirmed items are omitted. Base data was compiled from Wikidata from June 2026 onward; ages are recalculated daily and deaths are checked against Wikidata on an ongoing basis. English text is machine-assisted (facts translated by Sonnet, "My Take" written by Opus 4.8). The Japanese page is the source of record.