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When you boil it down to the basest of levels, track and field isn’t about times, places and medals. It’s about being badass. 

Right now you’re probably wondering how anyone can think a sport that measures greatness objectively can be at its core something so subjective.

Simple.

There are great performances and then there are performances that are so off-the-charts special that they fall into a whole different category.

For example, fans have descended on Eugene for the IAAF World Junior Championships this week not just looking for great efforts, but to follow badass in its various forms.

Baylor freshman Trayvon Bromell winning the 100m in a world-junior-record 9.97 at NCAAs wasn’t just great, it was badass. 

You could take someone like Mary Cain, who ran an American junior record 1:59.51 in the 800m, a world junior record 2:35.80 in the 1000m and an American junior record 4:04.62 in the 1500m. She is so badass she had to turn pro before graduating high school. 

Alexa Efraimson is rapidly climbing the badass ladder Cain style with her 2:03.26 800m, 4:32.15 mile, and 9:00.16 3000m world youth leads this season, so much so that she may soon be following Cain into the pro ranks.

And there is race walker Anezka Drahotova of the Czech Republic, who is her own kind of badass.

No, I did not type that sentence under the influence of any hallucinogenic substances.

How else do you describe a girl who is the best race walker in her country and one of the best in the world – she finished seventh in the 20K event at the World Championships in Moscow last year – but then can also cross over into the running world and compete at an elite level, and they can also compete as a sponsored international-level cyclist, placing 19th in the junior race at the 2013 UCI Road World Championships?

There is one word for that. Badass.

Last year, Drohotova set a national junior record (10:10.45) in the 3000m steeplechase ON THE SAME NIGHT that she won the race walk at the European Junior Championships.

That’s badass.

This spring, she ran a personal-best 74:25 to finish as the top Czech woman in the Prague Half Marathon and then less than a month later switched gears and won bronze in the junior race at the IAAF Race Walk World Cup in China.

That’s badass.

Today at World Juniors, Drahotova fulfilled her lifetime goal of winning a gold medal in the race walk. In the process, she also set a new world junior record of 42:47.25 in the pouring rain, breaking the former record of 42:59.48 set in 2011 by Russia’s Yelena Lashmanova. On Wednesday, Drahotova will again take her act to the track and compete in the heats of the steeplechase.

That is SO badass.

Doubles are common in track and field. You’d be hard-pressed, however, to convince me that there is a more badass double than the race walk-steeple double. That’s as natural a pairing as motor oil and ice cream.

Drahotova runs in about 20 races a year, mostly domestically, while also competing in about 12 cycling events to fulfill her sponsor obligations. She made her half marathon debut in Prague in 2012, finishing 11th in 1:19:33. She improved that personal-best to 1:18:25 in a 15th-place finish in last year’s race. On the track last outdoor season, she also notched PRs of 4:24.89 for 1500m, 9:26.28 for 3000m, and 16:47.24 for 5000m.

If that’s not badass, I’m not sure what is. 

Like most people, Drahotova thought race walking looked downright bizarre when she and her twin sister were first exposed to the sport as 12-year-olds in their tiny town of Rumburk in northern Bohemia.

“When we first saw it we actually didn’t like it,” she said. “There were a couple of people at the club doing race walk and I thought, ‘Why should I be doing this?’ I didn’t like the way it looked. But after a while, I grew to love the endurance of the sport.”

Seven years later, Drahotova remains a distance junkie, unable of tearing herself away from one discipline for another, although she realizes that the day is coming where in order to remain badass she is going to have to choose a focus.

“Many people tell me that while I have a broad talent if I focus on one I could be better,” Drahotova acknowledged. “Maybe next year I will do more cycling but I will probably continue with race walking for a while because last year I was seventh at the World Championships in Moscow. I will probably keep the race walking through Rio, but after the Olympic Games I will talk to my coach and perhaps prefer running. It's really all in the future, in the stars, but I have a passion for athletics.”

The common thread among all those who are badass.

Watch her new WJR HERE!