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)
Where do you turn when you need advice? A chatbot? A life coach? A wise and trusted friend?
How about a poet? Poets may not be famous for making the best life choices, but because they subject the mess of human existence to the discipline of language, they can be as helpful as any therapist or mentor.
Good poets know the rules and when to break them, which is something they can teach the rest of us.
To wit:
Giving advice is a peculiar literary undertaking. It flourishes in certain popular genres — graduation speeches, newspaper columns, country and western songs and poems like this one — but what, in these contexts, is it really for?
I’m thinking of situations when you don’t urgently need help but nonetheless enjoy reading answers to questions you may not have thought to ask. What interests you isn’t the content of the advice — you could get all the life hacks you want from A.I. — so much as the voice of the person dispensing it.
Wendy Cope is an English poet, born in 1945, who has been a fixture of her country’s literary scene since the 1980s. More recently, her short, buoyant poem “The Orange” has been widely memed online, bringing her to the attention of new readers beyond Britain.
Cope favors rhyme, meter, brisk jokes and tart aperçus. She addresses romance, friendship and the petty absurdities of modern life with disarming good humor. The last line of “The Orange” is “I love you. I’m glad I exist.” Somehow she makes it the opposite of cringe.
This isn’t the kind of poetry you would describe as “confessional.” And yet …
Question 1/7
Stop, if the car is going “clunk”
Or if the sun has made you blind.
Don’t answer e–mails when you’re drunk.
Tap a word above to fill in the highlighted blank.Want to learn this poem by heart? We’ll help.
Fill in the missing words below. You can always refer to the reading by A.O. Scott and full
text above.Let’s start with the first stanza.
A strong sense of place can deeply influence a story, and in some cases, the setting can even feel like a character itself. This week’s literary geography quiz highlights places where authors were born (or lived) that later became locations in their books. To play, just make your selection in the multiple-choice list and the correct answer will be revealed. At the end of the quiz, you’ll find links to the works if you’d like to do further reading.
AMERICA, U.S.A.: How Race Shadows the Nation’s Anniversaries, by Eddie S. Glaude Jr.
For those of us in the national memory-keeping business, anniversaries hold near-totemic power. Satisfyingly round units of time, ideally bearing fancy, Latin-derived names, serve as the overburdened pegs on which to hang think pieces and museum exhibits, revisionist documentaries and maudlin public ceremonies. The arbitrary nature of such occasions is precisely what gives them their charge, inviting us to set aside complacency and submit to a comprehensive check-in.
In his new book, “America, U.S.A.,” Eddie S. Glaude Jr. presents an intriguing variation on the genre, seeing the country’s 250th birthday as an anniversary of anniversaries: 50 years since the malaise-ridden, schlock-heavy Bicentennial. A century since the subdued Prohibition-era Sesquicentennial. A century and a half since telegraphed reports of George Armstrong Custer’s defeat by the Lakota and Cheyenne at Little Bighorn rudely interrupted the Gilded Age Republic’s 100th birthday party.
If an anniversary offers a snapshot of a moment, the core of Glaude’s book is an old-timey photo album, a collection of notable episodes from earlier national reckonings, long-ago glances in the mirror. An estimable scholar of Black history, politics and religion at Princeton — best known for “Begin Again,” his 2020 meditation on James Baldwin’s relevance for our times — Glaude focuses, as his subtitle puts it, on “how race shadows the nation’s anniversaries.”
Such celebrations, he contends, have never really been the moments for honest self-reflection they are often advertised to be. Instead, the nation usually shatters the mirror, refusing to accept what it prefers not to see. “American anniversaries are often moments to turn a blind eye to the evils of the past and the present,” Glaude writes, “to suppress the fact of America’s divided soul.”
It’s a clever concept, and, needless to say, perfectly timed. Last year, Glaude notes, the Trump administration executed a hostile takeover of the government’s studiously bipartisan 250th anniversary planning. It is now preparing a program that is certain to conceal more than it reveals about the country ostensibly being celebrated.
Glaude, in no mood for celebration, argues that such omissions and evasions also defined commemorations in the past. In 1875, Frederick Douglass predicted “one grand Centennial hosannah of peace and good will to all the white race of this country.” He was right: The nation reached 100 years old at a crucial moment in the post-Civil War fight over racial equality, with white Northerners ready to give up on Southern Reconstruction. The occasion would help the once-warring sections to reunite around a shared commitment to white supremacy. On May 10, 1876, at the opening of the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia, the police tried to bar Douglass from the grandstand, until a white politician vouched for him.
The 150th anniversary came soon after a resurgent Ku Klux Klan successfully pushed for a restrictive immigration law aimed at keeping America a “Nordic” nation. At the lavishly funded, lightly attended celebrations in Philadelphia, Black veterans of World War I were excluded from marching in the opening parade. A writer with The Associated Negro Press wondered “what was in the breast of those black men who fought to make America safe for Democracy and on Monday stood on the sidelines, forgotten, as the Nordic strode by in all his vain pride.”
By 1976, when the nation marked its Bicentennial, the violence of the ’60s had destroyed any semblance of consensus. Vietnam and Watergate had eroded trust in the government. The commission initially tasked with organizing the anniversary was disbanded amid reports of corruption. Corporations filled the vacuum, Glaude explains, with “star-spangled whoopee cushions; patriotic toilet seats; Liberty hamburgers; red, white and blue beer cans.” The author, around 8 years old at the time, dimly remembers donning a pair of tricolor trousers.
A half-century later, Glaude is refreshingly honest about the depths of his despair. “I do not love America, and never have, especially now,” he writes in one of the more startling opening sentences I’ve read in some time. He dismisses this year’s Semiquincentennial as reaching back “to a storybook America that requires either the banishment of Black people from view or the reduction of our role in the country’s history, so as to affirm America’s ongoing quest to be a more perfect union.”
Undoubtedly true. But Trump doesn’t own the country, at least not yet, nor the 250th anniversary of one of the most radically liberatory and confusingly contradictory events in world history — an inspiration, as Glaude shows, even to critical observers of the American experiment, like Douglass. Far from the revanchist MAGA-palooza in Washington, I suspect this summer’s unasked-for invitation to national soul-searching may surprise us yet.
Despite his despair, Glaude concludes that “the past still offers resources for us to freedom-dream.” So, too, does this book.
AMERICA, U.S.A.: How Race Shadows the Nation’s Anniversaries | By Eddie S. Glaude Jr. | Crown | 270 pp. | $31
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