Culture
Cole Hocker stuns the world to win men's 1500m gold
Cole Hocker of the United States scored one of the biggest upsets in Olympic running Tuesday night, outrunning Jakob Ingebrigtsen and outkicking Josh Kerr, and everyone else, down the stretch to win the men’s 1500-meter to turn what was supposed to be a two-man battle into the surprise of the Games.
With a massive kick in the final 30 meters, Hocker — born in Indianapolis, and reared at the University of Oregon, the heart and guts of American distance running since the days of Steve Prefontaine — finished in an Olympic record 3:27.65, just under a quarter of a second ahead of Kerr, the reigning world champion.
Yared Nuguse, Hocker’s teammate, outkicked Ingebrigtsen for the bronze as the defending Olympic champion faded to fourth after setting the pace for the first 1300 meters.
For Ingebrigtsen, it was another major disappointment, given his star power and outspoken nature. He has never been shy about his confidence in his abilities.
Ingebrigtsen, the last announced for the race, held up a single index figure and stared at the camera for all 80,000 fans to see on the giant video boards above the purple track. He should have held up four on a night when he lost his third consecutive championship 1500, including the 2022 and 2023 races at the World Athletics Championships.
On a perfect night for racing, the skies clear, the air still and dry and borderline cool, this was supposed to be the ultimate showdown between the imperious Ingebrigtsen and Kerr, the brash Scot who has had Ingebrigtsen’s number for years.
And that is how the race unfolded until the final turn. Ingebrigtsen, the fastest man in the field, went right to the front and set a blistering pace, 1:51.3 for the first 800. The strategy was laced with both guts and fear. He was courageous enough to try to do one of the hardest things in running, win a race from the front, wire-to-wire.
But the move was borne from the fear of knowing that other runners could finish faster than he could, that his only hope was to bury Kerr and the rest of the field far enough behind him so that they would run out of track before they would be able to catch him.
With 200 meters left, he heard the crowd noise rise to head-splitting levels. His head swiveled to the right, and he saw Kerr closing in. By the time they got to the final straightaway, Kerr was well on his way to passing him by.
WOW. 😱
A STUNNING upset in the men’s 1500m as AMERICAN COLE HOCKER takes gold! #ParisOlympics pic.twitter.com/wlq81lbvSO
— NBC Olympics & Paralympics (@NBCOlympics) August 6, 2024
But then so was Hocker, the former Oregon Duck flashing the speed that he has shown before, but never at this level or this pace.
He’d been tucked in the middle of the pack for the last 600 meters, not too close to the leaders but not too far off either, and when it was time to go, he went and went fast enough for both the Olympic and American records in one of the signature events of the Games.
“I kind of told myself that I’m in this race too,” Hocker said. “If they let me fly under the radar, then so be it. I think that might’ve just been the best.”
Kerr had the up-close view of Hocker’s triumph. The Scot had run a personal best and set the national record, and had little to be disappointed about. But he had no idea what unfolded behind him.
He looked at the scoreboard and saw Ingebrigtsen fell to fourth. A huge smile broke out across his face. He looked over at Hocker and Nuguse and started clapping at them like they were old mates.
Neil Gourley, Kerr’s teammate in Great Britain, ran for Hocker’s coach, Ben Thomas, for 10 years and has trained with Hocker. He said he wasn’t surprised at all by the result.
“If Cole is there and he has anything left in the last 150 meters, he’s dangerous,” he said. “Anyone who saw what he did in the U.S., nationals wouldn’t be surprised.”
And yet, how could you not be?
This was the race all running nerds had circled on their Olympic schedules, but not because of Hocker. In a sport where respect and politeness generally rule the day, at least in public, Ingebrigsten and Kerr veered toward trash talk.
There was a certain Scandinavian charm to Ingebrigtsen when he came on the scene five years ago, a middle-distance champion from a country where people generally win Olympic medals wearing skis rather than running spikes. He was the youngest of three running brothers.
Oldest brother Henrik finished fifth in the 1500 meters at the 2012 Olympics. Middle brother Filip won the bronze medal in the 1500 at the 2017 World Championships. Their father, Gjert, kept them on a tight leash while he trained them, warning off girlfriends, which worked until it didn’t.
The family allowed Norwegian television cameras to follow them for a documentary, which featured their rather monastic existence.
“Team Ingebrigtsen” became a huge hit and made the brothers famous, especially Jakob, whose profile skyrocketed when he won the gold medal in the 1500 at the Tokyo Olympics in 2021. Imagine “Keeping Up with the Kardashians” but with Norwegian distance runners and you get the idea.
Ingebrigsten would also win golds in the 5,000 at the world championships in 2022 and 2023. But somewhere along the way, his charm began to wear thin, especially in the northern region of Great Britain, Scotland to be specific, with members of the Edinburgh Athletic Club.
Somewhere along the way though, Ingebrigtsen’s confident charm morphed into something bordering on imperious disdain for the competition, none of which he backed away from even as he began losing races to those aforementioned members of the Edinburgh Athletics Club.
Ingebrigtsen has proven excellent at running but somewhat graceless in both victory and defeat, especially the latter. Perhaps his words get lost in translation, but in May of 2022, when asked if he was disappointed that the competition wasn’t pushing him, he said, “You can’t be disappointed with people not being better.”
That didn’t go over well, and Jake Wightman made him eat his verbiage two months later when he ran away from Ingebrigtsen in the 1500 final at the 2022 World Athletics Championships in Eugene, Ore. Ingebrigtsen quickly began telling people he hadn’t been at 100 percent. Wightman was “a lesser athlete.”
Last year, Kerr, 26, another Scot and former collegiate star at the University of New Mexico, started beating Ingebrigtsen.
He beat him at the 2023 World Athletics Championships in Budapest, where once more the Norwegian claimed to not have been at his best, and then this year at the Prefontaine Classic. He has referred to Kerr as “the next guy”, as in, the runner who can win when he isn’t fully fit.
He made no such claims, Tuesday night, at least not in English.
Asked if he regretted his decision to blaze out to the lead, he said yes and no.
“Of course, it’s a tactical error that I am not able to reduce my pace the first 800,” he said. “Just a little too hard.”
He said that with 650 meters to go, he could sense that Kerr and the others were pushing the pace faster, testing to see how much he had left. He said he tried to respond but ran out of gas — 1500 meters had proven “just 100 meters too much.”
“I ruined it for myself by going way too hard,” he said.
Not for Hocker, who is just 23 years old and part of a triumvirate of young American milers that had one of the country’s best races at the distance in Olympic history, with Nuguse, the 25-year-old child of Ethiopian immigrants who was born in Kentucky and attended Notre Dame, coming in third, and Hobbs Kessler, a 21-year-old from Ann Arbor, finishing fifth.
Kessler described Ingebrigtsen as the pinnacle of fitness. “It just shows how hard it is to run from the front,” he said.
Wasn’t that the truth Tuesday night, especially with an angry Scot and two Americans looking to make their mark giving chase?
“Both me and Cole knew coming in we could win on the right day,” Nuguse said. “A really cool moment.”
For him and for Hocker.
“That’s an unbelievable feeling,” Hocker said. “I just felt like I was getting carried by the stadium and God. My body just kind of did it for me. My mind was all there and I saw that finish line.”
Required reading
(Photo: Michael Steele / Getty Images)
Whatever you do, don’t think of a bird.
Now: What kind of bird are you not thinking about? A pigeon? A bald eagle? Something more poetic, like a skylark or a nightingale? In any case, would you say that this bird you aren’t thinking about is real?
Before you answer, read this poem, which is quite literally about not thinking of a bird.
Human consciousness is full of riddles. Neuroscientists, philosophers and dorm-room stoners argue continually about what it is and whether it even exists. For Wallace Stevens, the experience of having a mind was a perpetual source of wonder, puzzlement and delight — perfectly ordinary and utterly transcendent at the same time. He explored the mysteries and pleasures of consciousness in countless poems over the course of his long poetic career. It was arguably his great theme.
Stevens was born in 1879 and published his first book, “Harmonium,” in 1923, making him something of a late bloomer among American modernists. For much of his adult life, he worked as an executive for the Hartford Accident and Indemnity Company, rising to the rank of vice president. He viewed insurance less as a day job to support his poetry than as a parallel vocation. He pursued both activities with quiet diligence, spending his days at the office and composing poems in his head as he walked to and from work.
As a young man, Stevens dreamed of traveling to Europe, though he never crossed the Atlantic. In middle age he made regular trips to Florida, and his poems are frequently infused with ideas of Paris and Rome and memories of Key West. Others partake of the stringent beauty of New England. But the landscapes he explores, wintry or tropical, provincial or cosmopolitan, are above all mental landscapes, created by and in the imagination.
Are those worlds real?
Let’s return to the palm tree and its avian inhabitant, in that tranquil Key West sunset of the mind.
Until then, we find consolation in fangles.
When the director Rob Reiner cast his leads in the 1986 film “Stand by Me,” he looked for young actors who were as close as possible to the personalities of the four children they’d be playing. There was the wise beyond his years kid from a rough family (River Phoenix), the slightly dim worrywart (Jerry O’Connell), the cutup with a temper (Corey Feldman) and the sensitive, bookish boy.
Wil Wheaton was perfect for that last one, Gordie Lachance, a doe-eyed child who is ignored by his family in favor of his late older brother. Now, 40 years later, he’s traveling the country to attend anniversary screenings of the film, alongside O’Connell and Feldman, which has thrown him back into the turmoil that he felt as an adolescent.
Wheaton has channeled those emotions and his on-set memories into his latest project: narrating a new audiobook version of “The Body,” the 1982 Stephen King novella on which the film was based.
A few years ago, Wheaton started to float the idea of returning to the story that gave him his big break — that of a quartet of boys in 1959 Oregon, in their last days before high school, setting out to find a classmate’s dead body. “I’ve been telling the story of ‘Stand By Me’ since I was 12 years old,” he said.
But this time was different. Wheaton, who has narrated dozens of audiobooks, including Andy Weir’s “The Martian” and Ernest Cline’s “Ready Player One,” says he has come to enjoy narration more than screen acting. “I’m safe, I’m in the booth, nobody’s looking at me and I can just tell you a story.”
The fact that he, an older man looking back on his younger years, is narrating a story about an older man looking back on his younger years, is not lost on Wheaton. King’s original story is bathed in nostalgia. Coming to terms with death and loss is one of its primary themes.
Two days after appearing on stage at the Academy Awards as part of a tribute to Reiner — who was murdered in 2025 alongside his wife, Michele — Wheaton got on the phone to talk about recording the audiobook, reliving his favorite scenes from the film and reexamining a quintessential story of childhood loss through the lens of his own.
This interview has been edited and condensed.
“I felt really close to him, and my memory of him.”
Wheaton on channeling a co-star’s performance.
There’s this wonderful scene in “Stand By Me.” Gordie and Chris are walking down the tracks talking about junior high. Chris is telling Gordie, “I wish to hell I was your dad, because I care about you, and he obviously doesn’t.”
It’s just so honest and direct, in a way that kids talk to each other that adults don’t. And I think that one of the reasons that really sticks with people, and that piece really lands on a lot of audiences, and has for 40 years, is, just too many people have been Gordie in that scene.
That scene is virtually word for word taken from the text of the book. And when I was narrating that, I made a deliberate choice to do my best to recreate what River did in that scene.
“You’re just a kid,
Gordie–”
“I wish to fuck
I was your father!”
he said angrily.
“You wouldn’t go around
talking about takin those stupid shop courses if I was!
It’s like
God gave you something,
all those stories
you can make up, and He said:
This is what we got for you, kid.
Try not to lose it.
But kids lose everything
unless somebody looks out for them and if your folks
are too fucked up to do it
then maybe I ought to.”
I watched that scene a couple of times because I really wanted — I don’t know why it was so important to me to — well, I know: because I loved him, and I miss him. And I wanted to bring him into this as best as I could, right?
So I was reading that scene, and the words are identical to the script. And I had this very powerful flashback to being on the train tracks that day in Cottage Grove, Oregon. And I could see River standing next to them. They’re shooting my side of the scene and there’s River, right next to the camera, doing his off-camera dialogue, and there’s the sound guy, and there’s the boom operator. There’s my key light.
I could hear and feel it. It was the weirdest thing. It’s like I was right back there.
I was able to really take in the emotional memory of being Gordie in all of those scenes. So when I was narrating him and I’m me and I’m old with all of this experience, I just drew on what I remembered from being that little boy and what I remember of those friendships and what they meant to me and what they mean to me today.
“Rob gave me a gift. Rob gave me a career.”
Wheaton recalls the “Stand By Me” director’s way with kids on set, as well as his recent Oscars tribute.
Rob really encouraged us to be kids.
Jerry tells the most amazing story about that scene, where we were all sitting around, and doing our bit, and he improvised. He was just goofing around — we were just playing — and he said something about spitting water at the fat kid.
We get to the end of the scene, and he hears Rob. Rob comes around from behind the thing, and he goes, “Jerry!” And Jerry thinks, “Oh no, I’m in trouble. I’m in trouble because I improvised, and I’m not supposed to improvise.”
The context for Jerry is that he had been told by the adults in his life, “Sit on your hands and shut up. Stop trying to be a cutup. Stop trying to be funny. Stop disrupting people. Just be quiet.” And Jerry thinks, “Oh my God. I didn’t shut up. I’m in trouble. I’m gonna get fired.”
Rob leans in to all of us, and Rob says, “Hey, guys, do you see that? More of that. Do that!”
The whole time when you’re a kid actor, you’re just around all these adults who are constantly telling you to grow up. They’re mad that you’re being a kid. Rob just created an environment where not only was it supported that we would be kids — and have fun, and follow those kid instincts and do what was natural — it was expected. It was encouraged. We were supposed to do it.
They chanted together:
“I don’t shut up,
I grow up.
And when I look at you I throw up.”
“Then your mother goes around the corner
and licks it up,”
I said, and hauled ass out of there,
giving them the finger over my shoulder as I went.
I never had any friends later on
like the ones I had when I was twelve.
Jesus, did you?
When we were at the Oscars, I looked at Jerry. And we looked at this remarkable assemblage of the most amazingly talented, beautiful artists and storytellers. We looked around, and Jerry leans down, and he said, “We all got our start with Rob Reiner. He trusted every single one of us.”
And to stand there for him, when I really thought that I would be standing with him to talk about this stuff — it was a lot.
“I was really really really excited — like jumping up and down.”
The scene Wheaton was most looking forward to narrating: the tale of Lard Ass Hogan.
I was so excited to narrate it. It’s a great story! It’s a funny story. It’s such a lovely break — it’s an emotional and tonal shift from what’s happening in the movie.
I know this as a writer: You work to increase and release tension throughout a narrative, and Stephen King uses humor really effectively to release that tension. But it also raises the stakes, because we have these moments of joy and these moments of things being very silly in the midst of a lot of intensity.
That’s why the story of Lard Ass Hogan is so fun for me to tell. Because in the middle of that, we stop to do something that’s very, very fun, and very silly and very celebratory.
“Will you shut up and let him tell it?”
Teddy hollered.
Vern blinked.
“Sure. Yeah.
Okay.”
“Go on, Gordie,”
Chris said. “It’s not really much—”
“Naw,
we don’t expect much from a wet end like you,”
Teddy said,
“but tell it anyway.”
I cleared my throat. “So anyway.
It’s Pioneer Days,
and on the last night
they have these three big events.
There’s an egg-roll for the little kids and a sack-race for kids that are like eight or nine,
and then there’s the pie-eating contest.
And the main guy of the story
is this fat kid nobody likes
named Davie Hogan.”
When I narrate this story — whenever there is a moment of levity or humor, whenever there are those brief little moments that are the seasoning of the meal that makes it all so real and relatable — yes, it was very important to me to capture those moments.
I’m shifting in my chair, so I can feel each of those characters. It’s something that doesn’t exist in live action. It doesn’t exist in any other media.
“I feel the loss.”
Wheaton remembers River Phoenix.
The novella “The Body” is very much about Gordie remembering Chris. It’s darker, and it’s more painful, than the movie is.
I’ve been watching the movie on this tour and seeing River a lot. I remember him as a 14- and 15-year-old kid who just seemed so much older, and so much more experienced and so much wiser than me, and I’m only a year younger than him.
What hurts me now, and what I really felt when I was narrating this, is knowing what River was going through then. We didn’t know. I still don’t know the extent of how he was mistreated, but I know that he was. I know that adults failed him. That he should have been protected in every way that matters. And he just wasn’t.
And I, like Gordie, remember a boy who was loving. So loving, and generous and cared deeply about everyone around him, all the time. Who deserved to live a full life. Who had so much to offer the world. And it’s so unfair that he’s gone and taken from us. I had to go through a decades-long grieving process to come to terms with him dying.
Near the end
of 1971,
Chris
went into a Chicken Delight in Portland
to get a three-piece Snack Bucket.
Just ahead of him,
two men started arguing
about which one had been first in line. One of them pulled a knife.
Chris,
who had always been the best of us
at making peace,
stepped between them and was stabbed in the throat.
The man with the knife had spent time in four different institutions;
he had been released from Shawshank State Prison
only the week before.
Chris died almost instantly.
It is a privilege that I was allowed to tell this story. I get to tell Gordie Lachance’s story as originally imagined by Stephen King, with all of the experience of having lived my whole adult life with the memory of spending three months in Gordie Lachance’s skin.
Welcome to Great Adaptations, the Book Review’s regular multiple-choice quiz about printed works that have gone on to find new life as movies, television shows, theatrical productions and more. This week’s challenge highlights offbeat television shows that began as comic books. Just tap or click your answers to the five questions below. And scroll down after you finish the last question for links to the comics and their screen versions.
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