Cole Hocker found it difficult to recall how the Olympic 1500-meter race ended because it was such a surprising event. When, in his last attempt to go inside Norway’s Jakob Ingebrigtsen, he grabbed the rail and tried to enter, reporters questioned him. At first, Ingebrigtsen silenced him.
However, it was at this point that Hocker gave it another go and was successful in entering Ingebrigtsen. Did he ever consider using the outside space instead?
After the race, he asked the reporters gathered around him, “Did the rail open up?”
Indeed, they told him. With an inside kick, he prevailed.
Hocker will undoubtedly rewatch the race, the one in which he won in an Olympic record time of 3:27.65, over and over, and perhaps at that point, everything will make sense to him. However, everything appeared to be a haze in the moments following the run, even with a gold medal dangling around his neck as validation.
Few could have guessed that Hocker would stand atop a podium. In 3:27.79, Josh Kerr from Great Britain won the silver medal, while Yared Nuguse from the United States finished third in 3:27.80, trailing Kerr by only 0.01 of a second.
Given his Olympic gold medal from Tokyo in 2021 and his 3:26.73 time from three weeks ago in Monaco, Ingebrigtsen was the prerace favorite, but he finished empty-handed. On August 7, he starts the first round of the 5,000 meters, which is widely regarded as his best event.
This race, more than any distance race at these Games, had been long hyped, mostly because of the drama between the two favorites, Ingebrigtsen and Kerr, the 2023 world champion. Those two have had an entertaining war of words dating back to last summer.
Meanwhile, the Americans were quietly training, racing, and getting better all the time. That includes Hobbs Kessler, the 21-year-old who finished in fifth in 3:29.45.
Hocker took down his PR by nearly 3 seconds. Kessler PRed by more than 2 seconds, and Nuguse trimmed 1.23 seconds from his best a year ago. And the race marked a turning point for American male distance runners.
It’s been slim pickings for the U.S men in the distance races. Since 2019, the only American male distance runner to medal at the Olympics or the World Championships was Paul Chelimo, who won silver in the 5,000 in Tokyo. Yes, there have been two fifth-place finishes. But mostly Americans weren’t in the picture.
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That’s all changed in the span of five days in Paris. First it was Grant Fisher, on August 2, winning bronze in the 10,000 meters. And now two additional medals, Hocker and Nuguse, with Kessler hot on their heels and the 800 still to run.
Kicking off a hot pace
Fisher is his own story, but Hocker and Nuguse have always had fierce kicks. Now they have the strength to use those kicks at the end of fast races. And the Olympic final was the perfect race to test that out.
Ingebrigtsen took the race out in 54.9 seconds for 400 meters—ahead of world record pace. He later said he went out 2 seconds too fast.
“I think everyone was ready for a fast race in this era of the 1500,” Hocker said, “but the first 400 was still jarring, to say the least. And I was like, ‘Oh, we’re gonna have to run today.’ Like, there’s no messing around.” The split at 800 meters was 1:51.1.
