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

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— 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)

PARIS — Manila Esposito, the bronze medalist on the balance beam, stared like a deer in the headlights in a packed post-meet press conference. As she started to speak, her voice barely audible, Simone Biles reached over and adjusted Esposito’s microphone, nodding at the Italian gymnast that she was good to go. Later, after the moderator posed a question to Alice D’Amato, Esposito’s teammate, it took D’Amato a moment to respond. The moderator started to prompt her, when Biles gently reminded the moderator that the translation into the earpieces takes a little time to process.

Every now and again there comes a reminder: Simone Biles is 27 years old. This is not her first rodeo. She knows a thing or two about microphones and translations, succeeding and even a little bit about failing. Biles started competing internationally more than a decade ago, as a braces-wearing 16-year-old. She wasn’t old enough to drive. She wasn’t old enough to drink when she went to Rio in 2016.

Now she’s married but, like a new bride who is asked when she wants to start a family upon exiting the ceremony, Biles has been asked, even before she finished competition in Paris, how she feels about Los Angeles. She initially answered with a nonanswer. It would be lovely to compete on her home turf, she admitted, but she also acknowledged that age is not merely a number. “I’m old,” she said with a laugh.

Later she expressed her exasperation on X. “You guys really gotta stop asking athletes what’s next after they win a medal at the Olympics,” she tweeted, adding, “Let us soak up the moment we’ve worked our whole lives for.”

It is the crux of it, really, but in Biles’ case, it’s messaging that needs to be flipped. It is everyone else that needs to do the appreciating, instead of greedily wondering if we might get to enjoy more. This is what happens, of course. We get spoiled, and then desperate, desperate to not let go of a thing we probably took for granted. Biles is a constant, a near-sure thing in sports. Neither age nor injury, abuse or mental health demons, have defeated her. She comes back every time, and so we are left to fret: What if this is it?

It very well could be. Her coach, Cecile Landi, is leaving to become the head coach at the University of Georgia. Her husband and Biles’ co-coach, Laurent, will follow in a year’s time after their daughter graduates from college. It seems like the ideal transition. She has nothing left to prove, but then again, that’s the tease. This stopped being about proving anything three years ago.

Then, done in by the twisties in Tokyo, Biles did the painful digging to excavate the root of her mental-health struggles. She admitted to abuse at the hands of Larry Nassar and courageously questioned USA Gymnastics’ role in it before the Senate Judiciary Committee. She questioned her own “why,” a scary proposition for all of us, confronting really what we want and what we’re all about. She then had the courage to admit she’d lost her direction, that she’d exchanged her love for gymnastics for answering a bell. More courageously, Biles went and fixed it, taking a year off from a sport in which time is already unforgiving.

“To do the work, the personal work to be here and to perform, it’s amazing,” Laurent Landi said. “It just shows how tough the mind is, and that if you heal it properly, you can be very, very successful.”

She is hardly fading. Biles spent the entire week here dealing with a nagging calf injury, originally injured before trials and tweaked here, during qualifications. Doctors wrapped her leg for the entirety of the competition, and while Biles downplayed the seriousness of it — “Y’all are nosy,” she jokingly chastised reporters when asked — Landi admitted it’s been a matter of managing the pain, not eliminating it. Medication, treatment, ice, the usual lineup, all to ensure that it “held up,” much different than healed. “It was bothering her, of course,” he said. “Was it impacting her performances? I don’t think so.”

Landi smirked then, as if to say, “You tell me.” Four medals, three of them gold, more than all but 22 countries competing in Paris to date.

The final day, of course, was meant to be a coronation, a victory lap and an au revoir. Instead it revealed Biles’ humanity. She was tired. She’s competed in four of the five days possible here. And she was mentally drained. The pursuit of righting the Tokyo ship weighed heavily on her. The event finals felt weird, too. Instead of playing music while the gymnasts performed, Bercy Arena turned into a church, complete with would-be church ladies tsk-tsking people who dared to react when the gymnasts nailed a skill on beam.

“We asked several times if we could have some music or background noise,” Biles said. “So I’m not really sure what happened there.”

These are not excuses; they are realities. The beam turned into the Hunger Games, medals awarded to those who didn’t fall off. Three women, including Sunisa Lee, fell before Biles and two others had serious balance checks. Yet when Biles missed a landing on her back layout step out and fell, the arena gasped. Later, after the competition ended and Biles officially failed to medal, a mom in line at the Bercy Arena concessions stand bemoaned to her young daughter, “I feel so bad for Simone.” Her daughter, eyes wide, replied, “She fell,” as if she’d just watched DaVinci paint outside of the lines or Beethoven miss a chord.

In her defense, the girl couldn’t have been any older than 8, and in her lifetime, Biles has been Olympic perfection. Until this beam final, Biles had competed in nine different Olympic events in her career, including team, all-around and event finals. She’d medaled in each and every one, earning gold in seven.

Then her very humanity had the audacity to strike again. Two hours after her beam foible, Biles returned for the floor exercise, an event she’s never lost in either the Olympics or worlds. She landed awkwardly during warmups, appearing to tweak that same calf injury. Tended to briefly, Biles nonetheless went out and landed her first tumbling pass, restoring order to the universe. But on the second and the fourth, Biles twice stepped out of bounds, costing her precious tenths of a point, just enough to slot her second to Brazil’s Rebeca Andrade.

It should be noted — she messed up two moves named after her, that no one else even tries. This is Biles’ definition of failure.

Her definition of success? If you ask Biles, it’s not in the medals, her power. It’s in the very thing that showed itself on the last day of competition: her realness. She is proud of what she’s accomplished, but she’s more proud of who she’s become and the people she believes — accurately — she’s helped.

“Putting your mental health first, and taking time for yourself, whether you’re in sports or not, it’s about longevity,” she said. “Longevity in sports, specifically, but also just for a better, healthier lifestyle.”

Not far from where Biles competed, a woman walked down a Parisian sidewalk, following behind her friendly Australian shetland sheepdog. Indulging dog lovers in need of a fix, she stopped to chat. She is French, but in Paris to enjoy the Olympics and upon learning her new dog friends were from the U.S. said immediately how much she enjoyed the “American gymnast.” She had watched Biles’ documentary on Netflix and commended her for opening the dialogue on mental health.

“I am not an athlete,” she said, adding that she was nonetheless grateful that Biles made it OK to “talk about” your personal struggles. “I appreciate that.”

If this is the end, we should all appreciate Simone Biles.

(Top photo of Simone Biles with her gold medal from the vault competition: Tom Weller / VOIGT / GettyImages)

Sixty metres into the men’s 100-metre Olympic final in Paris and Noah Lyles is third. He is three-hundredths of a second down on his compatriot Fred Kerley and Jamaica’s Kishane Thompson.

Yet — and this may sound bizarre — that is exactly where he needs to be.

Lyles has unmatched top-end speed. He wins as Usain Bolt used to, opening up his stride (to a ridiculous 2.5m) and eating up ground on others before cruising past. He holds form while they struggle and decelerate.

The headline is Lyles winning by five-thousandths of a second in the closest men’s 100m Olympic final ever — and the hardest for which to qualify. Lyles (9.78sec) ran the fastest time in an Olympic 100m final since Bolt’s Olympic record (9.63) in London back in 2012.

Over that final 40m, Lyles can close anyone. He did it in 2023 to win the World Championships and again in trials to reach Paris.

The final frontier for him to become Olympic champion was the start… so here’s the story of how a 75-year-old and a stickman helped give Lyles the edge.

“Your reaction times suck,” says Ralph Mann.

It is July 2023 and the former Olympian — he won 400m hurdles silver at the 1972 Munich Olympics — who holds a PhD in biomechanics, is helping coach Lyles on his block starts.

At Lyles’ training base in Clermont, Florida, Mann, now 75, has a marquee set up by the side of the track. There are a series of cameras pointed at the blocks and a laptop running software that is going to eke the final per cent out of Lyles’ starts.

Over the last 40 years, Mann has watched and collected data on more than 500 of the best athletes. “We know what it takes to be an elite starter,” he says. Mann has written a 300-page textbook on the mechanics of sprinting and hurdling. What he doesn’t know isn’t worth knowing.

Mann has applied that knowledge and decades of experience into a software, created in 1999, that generates a stickman that overlays the video of the sprinter in the blocks. Adjusted for body size and weight (to Lyles), it shows where the limbs should be as the sprinter sets and springs out the blocks. If you’ve ever played a Mario Kart ghost race, it’s that, just applied to sprinting.

They can go frame-by-frame to see how Lyles moves compared to the most effective/efficient method, and it becomes a coaching tool for the session with real-time feedback.

Lyles’ problems were that his hips were too far back when he set and his foot turnover was poor on the first few steps. Compared to the stickman, Lyles was not compact enough in the drive phase (as the athletes get up to speed), his feet were coming up too high between steps and his contact time (how long the feet are on the floor) was too long. The ankles weren’t rigid enough, either.

In short, there was plenty to improve.

It meant that steps four to seven, which are all about extending range after getting out with the first three, would come up short compared to better starters. Mann explains to Lyles that the only way he can get faster is by reducing the time between steps and keeping contact time minimal. White tape was put horizontally across the track to give Lyles a visual representation of where he should be landing at specific steps (three and seven).

Lyles knows how the model works. When he asks Mann what he has set it at, he replies, “What we need to make you famous.” Lyles speaks about doing what works according to the model, in terms of his form, rather than what feels good. He has fully bought in.

He is loud and, to some, borderline arrogant, but Lyles shows vulnerability with Mann.

“Let’s see your precious model beat me,” he says, imploring Mann to set the model at better than Lyles’ absolute best. “Let it run away, let me get embarrassed,” says Lyles. At one stage, Mann stands over Lyles in the blocks and physically moves his hips forward in the set position. Lyles, half-joking, half-serious, says he feels like he isn’t even in the blocks.

There were green shoots of this working in February.

After losing six previous times, Lyles finally beat Christian Coleman over 60m indoors. Coleman (6.34sec) is the world record holder, but Lyles edged him out by one hundredth to take the U.S. indoors title in 6.43. Coleman got out faster, quicker with his foot turnover and was first to reach his second step, but Lyles was in contention enough (sixth at halfway, 30m) to close hard and took it on the line — you’ll see a theme developing.

For a guy who could not break 6.5sec in 2023, it was huge. Coleman then beat Lyles at the World Indoors in Glasgow in March, but Lyles ran 6.47 in the semi-final and 6.44 in the final.

Fast forward to Paris.

Mann was right: Lyles’ reaction times do suck, by Olympic standards anyway. He was the joint-slowest to react in the final (178milliseconds, with Letsile Tebogo), 26th of 27 among semi-finalists (167ms) and 46 of the 70 men in the heats, who did not false start, reacted quicker (161ms).

That is one of the hardest parts to train. Nobody wants to false start in the Olympics and the 80,000-capacity Stade de France is loud. Lyles responding slower than others did not help, but it would not be the difference between gold and silver.

Lyles, in lane seven because he finished third in his semi-final, takes his second and third steps before Thompson in lane three. It shows great foot turnover given he was the last to get out.

His form and mechanics are good, even if he doesn’t accelerate as quickly through the drive phase as the Jamaican, or Tokyo 2020 100m champion Marcell Jacobs. Lyles was last up until 40m, but by 30m was moving at the same speed as Thompson.

The 60m split is the one that matters: 6.44. Lyles is suddenly third, having jumped four places from the 50m mark, going past Jacobs (lane nine), Akani Simbine (lane five), Tobogo and Oblique Seville. The latter two are outside and inside Lyles respectively.

8 frames, 1 iconic 100m final 🖼️#Paris2024 pic.twitter.com/0Q6ItW3e4j

— World Athletics (@WorldAthletics) August 4, 2024

“I was fortunate to have Seville next to me because, all throughout the year, he’s been hitting that acceleration that I wasn’t hitting,” said Lyles. “I wasn’t going to let him go.”

Though, as Mann once said: “Noah’s biggest competition is Noah.” His 60m split in the final was only one hundredth off what he managed at the U.S. Indoors. At the Paris Diamond League in June 2023, Lyles won in 9.97, going through 60m in 6.55. He saved one of his best starts ever for the final.

Thompson and Fred Kerley went through 60m in 6.41sec, but both had already well hit terminal velocity and were slowing. Lyles peaked slightly later than the pair and held form for longer, slower to decelerate.

Lyles’ extra stride length adds up. Across the full race, Lyles (44) took one fewer step than Thompson (45). The Jamaican might dwarf Lyles for arm or leg size, but strong arms can only pull an athlete to the line a certain amount. There is no replacement for good mechanics.

Lyles was in last at 40 meters, 7th at halfway…

His close & holding on to speed is amazing.

You can see the slight difference in the last two 10 meter splits. He ran .84 and .86 versus Thompson’s .85 and .87

What a race. What a close. pic.twitter.com/fpBAE06QJL

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— Steve Magness (@stevemagness) August 4, 2024

Lyles closed the last 40m in 3.35sec, the fastest in the race. Thompson closed in 3.38. Five others, barring Simbine who finished hard in fourth, covered the last 40m in 3.4sec or slower. “I wasn’t patient enough with my speed — I should have let it bring me to the line,” said Thompson.

In his book — it’s a textbook, really — Mann lists a series of athletes as the best in certain categories. There are the most talented, the most professional, most driven and best representatives of the sport, but he puts Lyles as one of his favourites.

After 100m gold in Paris, and a legitimate shot at doing the double with the 200m, Lyles ought to put Mann in his favourites too.

“Ralph Mann, before I left for Paris, said this is how close first and second is going to be away from each other,” said Lyles, bringing his index finger and thumb close together to gesture an inch. “I can’t believe how right he was.”

GO DEEPER

Noah Lyles’ mouth wrote the check. On the Olympics stage, his feet cashed it

(Top photo: Andy Cheung/Getty Images)