Elizabeth Laseter Holds Off World Record Holder Shelby Houlihan at the Beer Mile World Classic

It takes four beers and four laps of a track to finish a beer mile, and at the Beer Mile World Classic in Cologne the women’s title was still decided by less than a second. Elizabeth Laseter won it in 5:56.1 on Sept. 18, holding off Shelby Houlihan, the world record holder, for her fourth straight world title.

Houlihan crossed the line in 5:56.9, only 0.8 seconds behind, and Melanie Pozdol, the 2022 champion, was third, 1.8 seconds off the winner. That made Pozdol just the third woman ever to break six minutes in the beer mile, and no race had ever had three of them. Laseter’s winning time also took eight-tenths of a second off the championship record she set in Lisbon last year.

Pozdol, captain of the U.S. team, went straight to the front off the first beer, which is how she tends to race. Laseter caught her during the second lap and had a lead of roughly 40 meters by the time she reached the chug zone for the final can. Houlihan was the quickest runner on the track and spent the last lap closing the gap in a 59-second split, according to Paul Edwards of The Telegraph, who reported from trackside. With 150 meters left the gap was still around 25 meters, and she ran out of track.

“The third beer is everyone’s most hated beer,” Laseter told Edwards. “You’ve got to get the bubbles out of your stomach but not too much because you run the risk of throwing up.”

Laseter and Houlihan had never shared a start line before Cologne. Houlihan’s 5:43.81 at the 2023 World Classic in Chicago still stands as the women’s world record, but she ran it in a separate heat. At the time she was serving a four-year ban after testing positive for the steroid nandrolone. She has always maintained her innocence and attributed the result to a contaminated pork burrito, an explanation the Court of Arbitration for Sport did not accept. Other women in the field objected to racing her, and she was moved.

“We just didn’t feel comfortable with that,” Laseter said, adding that although nothing barred Houlihan from the race, “it felt uncomfortable and felt like it went against the spirit.”

Houlihan’s ban ended in January 2025, and she has been back on the track since, winning the U.S. 5,000m title last year and finishing second over the same distance at this year’s national championships in 14:57.88. In March she won The TEN in 30:50.10, in her debut at 10,000m, a time that put her 10th on the U.S. all-time list. After Cologne she said she loved finishing her season this way.

“At the end of the day, you know, it’s like regardless of how it goes, we drink four beers and we’re a little drunk after and we’re just having a good time,” she said.

Laseter, a food writer and editor who ran track and cross-country at Johns Hopkins, has her own history with the event. In Leuven, Belgium, in 2022 she ran 6:15, which would have been a world record at the time, but was disqualified for stepping outside the chug zone. Pozdol won that year, and Laseter has not lost the title since.

Canada’s Corey Bellemore had a much lonelier race, winning his eighth world title, and his sixth in a row, in 4:42.10, finishing about 15 seconds clear of his compatriot Maxime Lapierre (4:57.00). The next two places went to the U.S., through Hayden Bunnell in 4:58.20 and Joe Kehoe in 5:00.40. Bellemore’s time was well outside the 4:27.10 world record he set in Lisbon last year.

“This year wasn’t a record-breaking one, but I always go into the beer mile looking to put down a solid performance,” Bellemore told Powerplay Windsor.

Team USA took the men’s team title, the Kingston Cup, back from Canada, with Sweden second and the defending champions third. Bellemore has recently picked up a sponsor in Sprints, the running clothing company, and his calendar now turns to triathlon and the roads.