Hocker would have smoked Ingebrigtsen

Both courses short. Euro course harder. Jakob for the win and on another level than Hocker.

Recall how the US women (mostly a subset of BTC) that had entertained hopes for team bronze at worlds XC 2019 completely failed. The course yesterday was, I think, in some ways more "technical", while Aarhus had one long gruelling hill, this one had really steep ones, reducing some runners to a walk. That favorites prevailed in the majority of races should not deceive one how badly some pretty decent athletes because of these difficulties.

In any case, one cannot compare races on totally different courses. Let them run against each other.

Nope

I don't know how the US course was, but the European track was very very hard and with technical bits making it slow. Alot of people were on their ass and when have Hocker ever beat Ingebrigtsen or even won a major championship. All respect to Hocker but it's another level..

I think hocker could've won the u23 race, but Jakob is on a different level.

This is a troll thread so the OP is not really worth addressing directly.

I know that the USATF course was short by quite a bit and was not really challenging at all in addition to essentially being a road race, but why do you say that the Euro course was short?

In terms of difficulty, there is no comparison between the courses and Jakob beats Cole handily regardless of which course they would have raced on.

Is Hocker European?

Nah I heard Hocker has been practicing musuem hallway sprints, something about them being the new wickets

Hocker is British-American

No, I can see he’s white, but is he a dual citizen?

The official results give 9572m. But nobody ever cared about the exact length of these courses, so I'd doubt that this is really as precise as it seems.

Maybe this has been addressed elsewhere, but how in the H - E - double hockey sticks did officials mis-measure the 10k course for the club champs?? And by a lot. The mind boggles.

Nevermind. Addressed on another thread. "Where was our $3.7 million man?" was comment gold.

Just keep in-mind that Jakob took down Hocker at Pre last year.

And for the millionth reminder, nobody cares about cross country times.

Actually I think he is Indian-American.

Aren't all cross country courses pretty much the same?

Thanks for the link. You're right about the distance and the Europeans not caring a lot about exact distances. If it was specified in such a precise fashion, though, it was probably pretty accurate.

Times don't really seem to mean a lot to them in these cross meets either. The fascination with fast times in XC seems to be a uniquely American phenomena. If a easy and flat course brings better times, that seems to make the sport more interesting for many Americans.

I quickly looked through those results to see if I recognized any NCAA runners. At first glance, I saw Aaron Bienenfeld of Oregon & Germany. He ran 29:12 on what was supposedly a true 10K at the NCAAs at Oklahoma State. At the Euros he ran 30:25 on a 9572m course. Barry Keane of Butler & Ireland ran 29:18 at the NCAAs & 30:52 at the Euros.

It seems to me that the Euro course was probably a good bit more difficult than OSU's course given that the times are slower and the course was probably about 428 meters shorter.

Also, Charles Hicks, the NCAA champion, won the U23 race in 23:40. The distance of that race was 7662 meters. That is an average mile of about 4:58. He won the NCAA meet with a time of 28:43.6, an average mile of 4:37.4.

The Europeans don't even bother with tenths when posting XC times.

I think that Cole Hocker would do well with European-style XC, but it is definitely a more challenging sport and comparisions to the sport here are even more worthless than comparing a XC course in Florida to one in Oklahoma.

I watched the race on the link from letsrun. Very technical course. It looked like sometimes they had trouble with their footing. Those short, steep hills slowed down all of the runners as they neared the top. Lot's a turns. The museum part was very cool.

We need a course like that here.

To be fair, it was the most "technical" course in the half dozen or so of these Euro XC I have seen. They are all over the place if usually more demanding than the typical US course. There were muddier ones, sometimes simply because of the weather (e.g. Tilburg 2018) and 2014 in Bulgaria it was all covered in snow (and I think there were some serious injuries from slipping). But e.g. Hyeres 2015, Chia 2016 and Slovakia (Samorin?) 2017 were mostly firm, grassy, although with a bunch of small hills and/or deep sand stretches.

It might not have been the only reason but e.g. Yasmin Can DNF yesterday and faded to 14th last year after she had won 4 golds in a row, of these at least 2016 and 17 easily running away from the field (these fields were a bit weaker but Grovdal, Bahta were pretty strong back then and Can totally dominated them).

There were a few somewhat prominent DNF yesterday that might have been because of the tough course, e.g Filip I, Sarah Healy (wU23), Axel Vang Christensen (mU20), and several more runners, especially in the U-categories badly faded in the second half of their races.

I saw only one fall on screen, the Spaniard on the first leg of the mixed relay (fortunately he was apparently lucky and continued) but I later saw a picture of a dutch? guy on social media who had so much mud on his shoulder that he must have had a fall as well.