A gifted athlete with a heart

His track friends saw him another way. Not the guy with the scars, but a nice guy with a good sense of humor, an interest in others and someone who could really run. That helped Dos Santos create a different kind of life.

That life now involves traveling the world, scooping up medals and playing a main role in one of the best and most durable dramas going in his sport.

The 400m hurdles race is a science of sorts, defined at first by Edwin Moses, who used his mathematics smarts to chart the quickest way across 10 hurdles on a grueling lap around the track.

More than 40 years later, with the help of better training and, in a very big way, better shoes that act like mini-trampolines, Dos Santos and his rivals are putting up numbers that felt impossible a generation ago.

And unlike when Moses reigned — he won 122 straight races from 1977 through 1987 — Dos Santos, Karsten Warholm and Rai Benjamin are sharing time in the winner's circle.

Benjamin is the reigning Olympic champion after his win last year in Paris, while Warholm won the world championships in Budapest in 2023. He took the title from Dos Santos, who had won gold at the worlds in Eugene, Oregon, a year earlier.

In September, they returned to the site of one of the most epic races of them all — at the Tokyo Olympics in 2021.

It was there that Warholm ran 45.94, bettering his own mark by .76, barely a month after he broke a record that had stood for nearly 19 years. Benjamin placed second with what would have been a world-record time had he won. Dos Santos finished third in a time that would have been a world record had he run it six weeks earlier.

This time in Tokyo, Benjamin took the gold, and Dos Santos, the silver.

When asked what has most contributed to making everyone better, Dos Santos doesn't list a technological feat, but another hurdler — the man he edged out at the Tokyo worlds by .22 of a second: bronze medalist Abderrahman Samba.

When Samba of Qatar ran 46.98 in June 2018, he became the first hurdler to crack 47 seconds since Kevin Young set the world record at 46.78 in 1992.

Now, Samba's time is tied for a distant 38th best ever. Of the 37 faster times, all but one — Young's — were posted by Warholm, Benjamin or Dos Santos.

"The first time Samba broke 47, I think he switched something for everybody," Dos Santos said.

"When you see someone doing it 20 years ago you say, 'OK, that was 20 years ago, nobody's doing that now'. But, when you see Samba doing that, you think: 'I've got to train harder'. You're no longer dreaming about low-48 and thinking you might get a medal."