Below is an excerpt from the Lap Count newsletter, posted with permission. Kyle Merber’s Lap Count newsletter both entertains and enlightens fans about athletes and happenings in our sport.
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From the Lap Count Newsletter
The best thing about the 1500 for fans is also the worst thing about the 1500 for the athletes who race it — it can be a complete crapshoot. Something about the metric mile – the non-round number of laps? the tendency to get tactical? the near immediate brain collapse from lactic acid buildup? – makes for more frequent major upsets than in seemingly any other event.
But Australia’s Olli Hoare winning the Commonwealth gold was not a lucky roll of the dice — remember when he ran 3:47.48 at the Oslo Dream Mile? Instead, it was Hoare missing the World Championship final entirely that was the fluke.
After a short couple of weeks, that disappointment was totally erased. As an outsider to the Friendly Games, it’s difficult to put into perspective just how meaningful this win is. So I’ll let the roaring crowd of 30,000 fans enthusiastically doing the wave and chugging beers at 11am do the explaining. C’mon now! It’d be ignorant for American fans to make a Revolutionary War joke and then pretend not to care.
Especially, when the twelfth finisher — last place — goes 3:35.72! Hoare ran 3:30.12 to out-kick the last two World Champions, and eight men ran personal bests. Some American 1500 runners are probably wishing that our independence from the Crown hadn’t been so acrimonious so that they could have been in a race of this caliber.
The main thing to appreciate about Olli is that he made no excuses after the World Championships. Perhaps that’s because he didn’t have one. It’s always a curious thing when an athlete has a bad race and can immediately turn around in an interview five minutes later and rattle off all the reasons why it went poorly. When that happens, it’s almost a guarantee that they had those cued up and ready before the gun went off.
In every 1500m race, there is an alternative universe where the finishing order is entirely different. But in the post-Rio world, the constant seems to be that if you want to win then you’ll have to run fast to do it.
