Also just caught the 1500m. Wow, what a race!
Regarding the 1500m I am wondering when we will start seeing sacrificial efforts by team mates. Road cycling and triathlon this is relatively common, for example in the men’s triathlon Dickinson was clearly given the role to do all he could to help Yee win the gold medal.
Norway knew that while Ingerbrigtsen was the fastest 1500m runner in the field he was vulnerable to others with a faster finish (probably thinking mainly of Kerr but Hocker is also in this category). Ingerbrigsten acting as pacemaker for the others was an insanely risky strategy, as it is much harder t run from the front than tucked behind the leader therefore it would make sense for the Norwegians to instruct Nordas to act as pacemaker go hard for the first 1200m turning the raceinto a diamond league style race which Ingerbrigsten usually wins.
We’re starting to get caught up on the swimming events (other than gymnastics, the two sports my family is really big on are swimming and track and field). Question: How much does anyone other than a few brie-for-brains on Twitter give a cuss about the US/Australia “rivalry”? It smells entirely like some phoney-baloney fluff NBC ginned up out of whole cloth. My understanding was that the vast majority of athletes competed to win and weren’t particularly concerned about who they deprived of a medal. Is NBC just that obsessed with the idea of America having an enemy? There was even a moment when the graphic of the medal count of US vs. Australia in swimming (seriously, who keeps track of this?) went up, and the announcer very, very smarmily circled the US’ gold tally. Several times. This was an alleged adult, mind you. 
I’m definitely going to have to find that 1500. Sounds like a party.
Spoons - I’m pretty sure nearly every male cheerleader has a story like this. Knowing a good thing when you have it and being able to ignore all the yammering fools rocks, doesn’t it? 
psychobunny - See, see, THAT’S what I’m so riled about. Just no chill whatsoever. On one end you have intestinal parasites on social media (jumping Tewi Inaba, how I despise Twitter) unwilling to tolerate not having their every desire met for one freaking millisecond, and on the other end you have pompous white knighting gasbags with all the knowledge of a plate of escargot. Of course, the notion of talking to the freaking beach volleyball players themselves and getting their perspective is completely out of the question. (And in what freaking universe are tight stretch pants not sexy? For crying out loud, even Japan figured this out!)
Damn straight!
Here you go.
I don’t know whether the athletes care about this at all, but I have heard it mentioned in previous Olympics. I think the idea is just that the U.S. and Australia are the traditional swimming powers at the Games. France (Léon Marchand) and Canda (Summer McIntosh) both had great performances this year, but those are a bit out of the ordinary. U.S. and Australia are always great; of such things are rivalries made.
And some of the taling heads on NBC are former swimmers. Maybe they’ve been told by their corporate masters to hype the rivalry as a storyline, or maybe they’re speaking from experience.
Someone on Facebook posted a comment questioning how Mondo Duplantis, who was born, raised, and went to college in the U.S., could want to compete for Sweden in the Olympics.
My reply:
Mondo only pawn in game of life.
Katzberg is a phenom, and even as a non-expert you can see why he throws the hammer farther than anyone: he has unnatural turning speed, looking literally like a Tasmanian Devil tornado in the ring. The hammer simply has to go far with that amount of kinetic energy.
Duplantis is incredible, and knows how to play the audience, but as far as Greek gods go, I can’t get over the hunched posture Duplantis has - not that it detracts anything from his athletic ability.
It’s uncanny, having never seen a pole vaulter that didn’t have absolutely perfect posture, and then the scrawny guy with a hunch beats them all.
Really enjoyed the women’s 3000m steeplechase tonight. That’s what the Olympics are all about.
Not yet another basketball game.
That has been going on for a long time with the Kenyan and Ethiopian teams at the longer distances. It is more sharing the lead to keep the pace high with the knowledge that there is probably one with the best chance to win. There was a bit of that in the women’s 5000m the other night.
Correct. In the first sub-four-minute-mile, two of Roger Bannister’s teammates, both of whom were track stars in their own right, provided the pacing for Bannister’s effort. This was in 1954.
But in yesterday’s race, I’m not sure that a ‘pacesetter’ would have made any difference. Ingebrigtsen set a torrid pace throughout the entire race. Hocker’s time was an Olympic record.
Cole Hocker’s 1500m performance has to be one of the greatest ever. With about 14 seconds to go he was blocked trying to pass Ingebrigtsen on the inside and had to back off, which looked like it must be the end of a valiant effort. But he showed he still had a lot left, and won going away.
Remarkable.
I must admit I was secretly happy that Ingebrigtsen was crushed at the last possible moment, with guys pouring past him. Ingebrigtsen comes across a little smug in the many interviews I’ve seen, and I always root for the underdog, anyway.
Hocker sure had a great finish, but he was lucky that Ingebrigtsen inexplicably opened the door. That was a big tactical blunder.
I felt the same. Ingebrigtsen is an outstanding athlete, but also an arrogant ass.
I was biting my tongue, saying ‘a little smug’… 
I pretty much don’t watch Track and Field, but all the comments here inspired me to watch the 1500 that everyone was loving.
The thing is, I wasn’t sure until the end which guy was this Hocker (I thought maybe he was the American coming up on the outside) but I was mostly amazed at how, well, beautiful the entire lot of them looked running. It’s a feeling of perfection, I mostly get it when a group of animals are doing something they are absolutely designed to do – schools of birds or fish wheeling as if their motions are choreographic, herds of impalas simply flowing along, even horses and dogs just running for the fun of it. They are doing what their bodies have been designed to do, and it’s a joy to watch.
I mean, yeah, it’s not that uncommon to see people run, not even whole groups of them when they have a reason to run to or away from something happening, but most people look funny running. Their bodies bob up and down, their arms flail, they’re clearly straining and laboring and they should NOT be doing that.
But these guys… bodies upright, hardly moving up or down, almost as if they were at rest, with their long lean legs flashing along… Yeah, okay, humans DO have running as a natural gait. At least, a tiny percentage of us do.
(Not me, ever. I’m short AND long-waisted AND broad hipped. When the predators are out casing the herd of fleeing humans for dinner, I’m first on the menu.)
Pacesetters have been going on for a long time but not in olympic finals.
Roger Bannister broke the 4 minute mile at a small meeting made specifically for the attempt at the world record.
It is now the normal at Diamond league meetings for extremely good runners t be employed as pace setters often in the hope that the world record will be broken (or at least some other significant record).
Last Month Ingebrigsten ran almost 1 second quicker than Hocker did at the Olympics. That was done with pace makers, but then Hocker had a “pacemaker” as well. If Nordas had set the pace for Ingerbrigsten for the first 1200 or so (and then dropped out as he would not be able to maintain the pace any longer) Ingerbrigsten would be much fresher for the last 300m as he had been running in Nordas’s slipstream. We have no way of knowing what the result would have been but Ingebrigstens chances would have been significantly higher.
It takes a crap ton of training to achieve that smoothness. I don’t know how “natural” it is.
His approach to the race was clearly a strategic decision.
He went for a risky strategy, and it backfired. Given how close he came, it wasn’t even an unreasonable one. But that’s how it goes sometimes.
At the very least, it produced another incredible moment to be associated with 2024.