9 Final Thoughts on the 2024 Paris Olympics

The Paris Olympics are over, and with it, the 2024 professional track season has come to a close.

Just kidding!

You might be feeling a bit tracked-out after an incredible 10 days of racing in Paris, but we’ve still got five more Diamond Leagues to go this season as well as Alexis Ohanian‘s new Athlos event in New York in September. Personally, I’m finding it a little hard to get excited about another track meet right now, but…what’s that you say? Jakob Ingebrigtsen and Cole Hocker are racing a 1500 against each other in Lausanne next week? Okay, just give me a few more days to nurse this Olympic hangover and I’ll be good to go.

But Lausanne is still eight days away. In the interim, let’s take one last look back at Paris.

Was this the best Olympic track & field competition ever?

Leaving Les Invalides after the women’s marathon wrapped on Sunday, I wondered to myself: did we just witness the greatest Olympic track & field competition ever? This certainly felt like an all-time great meet packed with great performances and close finishes. Consider the highlights:

• Noah Lyles going from last to first to win a historically deep 100 over Kishane Thompson by .005.
• Quincy Hall‘s incredible comeback to win the men’s 400 over Matthew Hudson-Smith.
• Emmanuel Wanyonyi beating Marco Arop by .01 to win the first 800 ever with four men under 1:42.
• Cole Hocker upsetting Josh Kerr and Jakob Ingebrigtsen with an Olympic record in the 1500.
• The USA men edging Botswana in one of the greatest 4x400s ever run.
• Mondo Duplantis‘ 6.25m world record in the pole vault.
• Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone‘s 50.37 world record in the 400 hurdles.
• Sifan Hassan kicking to marathon gold in the final 200 after earning bronzes in the 5,000 and 10,000.
• Femke Bol‘s perfectly-timed 47.93 anchor leg to come from way back to win the mixed 4×400 for the Netherlands.

Admittedly, I’m a little biased because all of these races are fresh in my mind. The Olympics ended three days ago. No doubt some of those races will endure as all-time classics, but it’s very hard to project that in the moment.

I mean, can I definitively say this Olympics was better than London 2012, when we had Bolt v Blake in the sprints, David Rudisha running the most beautiful 800 in history, the Bahamas upsetting the US men in the 4×400, and Mo Farah kicking off the 5,000/10,000 double on Super Saturday with Jessica Ennis and Greg Rutherford? Or Sydney 2000, with Haile G against Tergat, Nils Schumann and Noah Ngeny upsetting Wilson Kipketer and Hicham El Guerrouj, and Cathy Freeman winning gold on home soil after lighting the Olympic cauldron to begin the Games? What about Mexico City in 1968, an altitude-fueled orgy of sprint world records that also saw Dick Fosbury revolutionize the high jump, Bob Beamon break the long jump, and Tommie Smith and John Carlos produce one of the most powerful images in the history of sports?

This is an inherently subjective exercise, and we’re partial to the Olympics we experienced ourselves. But if we keep it to the three I have covered in-person for LetsRun.com — Rio 2016, Tokyo 2020, and Paris 2024 — then Paris was easily the best.

And not just because of the action on the track. The fans in Paris brought it. Every day, I’d look at the schedule for the morning session — always some combination of first-round heats, field event qualifying, and repechage rounds — and wonder if that was the day the fans failed to show up. And every day, there would be 70,000+ on hand, shouting their lungs out for everything from the decathlon shot put to the 5,000 meters. The athletes loved it.

“From the first lap, the crowd was screaming,” Grant Fisher said after his bronze in the 10,000 meters. “I couldn’t hear anything that entire race. The 10k doesn’t get a lot of love sometimes, but that crowd felt like we were the best show in town.”

Kevin Morris photo

Track & field is rarely like this. During most morning sessions — and even some evening sessions — at Rio 2016, the Olympic stadium was not even one-third full. Tokyo 2020 had no fans — due to COVID, of course. Hayward Field could not sell out a 15,000-seat stadium for the 2022 World Championships.

But the fans show up in Europe. I’ve covered five World Championships and three Olympics, and the three best crowds were all in Europe: London 2017, Budapest 2023, and Paris 2024. It’s no coincidence. Europe is home to the most serious athletics fans, and it’s far easier/quicker to travel between major cities than any other continent; so many Dutch fans made the trip for the night of the women’s 400-meter hurdles final, the Stade de France felt like Amsterdam. It is a shame we will have to wait until 2029 at the earliest for the next Worlds/Olympics in Europe — unless you count the inaugural World Athletics Ultimate Championship in Budapest in 2026.

Why did the American distance men overdeliver?

Before the Olympics, we at the LetsRun.com Track Talk Podcast set an over/under of 2.5 medals for American distance runners in Paris. If anything, you could argue it was optimistic. At the 2022 and 2023 World Championships, Americans combined to win two medals from the 800 through marathon, and the woman responsible for both of those medals, Athing Mu, would not be competing in Paris.

So how did Team USA end up with five distance medals in Paris — all on the men’s side?

The main thing is health. Fisher has finished 4th, 5th, and 6th in global championships in the past, but last year, he was injured and did not make it to Worlds. Hocker finished 7th in the 1500 in Budapest after missing three months due to an Achilles injury at the start of last year, while Yared Nuguse was 5th after dealing with illness during the rounds. At this level, the margins between a medal and 4th or 5th are not very wide, and having three of America’s best runners fit and healthy in 2024 made a big difference.

Rooks made a huge leap in 2024 (Kevin Morris photo)

What about Kenneth Rooks? Well, turns out the guy is far more talented than any of us realized. You don’t run 8:06 in the Olympic final by accident; Rooks is now faster than Evan Jager was at the same age. Last year, he was still too young and inexperienced to contend for a medal, but he reached an entirely new level in his first year as a pro and has the tools to stay there for a while.

There’s also some good luck involved here. It certainly helped Rooks that the second-fastest steepler in the world right now, Abrham Sime, did not get named to the Ethiopian team, and that Geordie Beamish (a huge threat in a slower race like the Paris final) has been injured for the last two months and went out in the heats. And that Lamecha Girma fell on the last lap – though Rooks made his own luck there to some extent by springing such a big, surprising move on the field. It helped Fisher in the 5,000 that Joshua Cheptegei opted not to double back from the 10,000 and that Moh Ahmed fell in the prelims and was not advanced.

These sort of breaks happen every year and tend to even out over time – Hocker and Fisher may have been healthy this year, but the US’s best chance at a medal (Athing Mu) was not. Bryce Hoppel ran a race that would have gotten on the podium in any other year but the 800 decided to go crazy in 2024.

But there wasn’t much luck involved in the men’s 1500 and 10,000, where the US claimed three of its five medals. Both races featured loaded fields and went super fast. The Americans simply ran their way onto the podium by running great races.

The Matthew Centrowitz-Cole Hocker story reaches an epic conclusion

Cole Hocker and Matthew Centrowitz‘s Olympic 1500 victories could not have been more different. Centro led the entire race in Rio in 2016 and ran 3:50.00, the slowest winning time at the Olympics since 1932. Hocker ran from behind in Paris and set an Olympic record of 3:27.65. But Hocker and Centrowitz will always be linked, and not just because they attended the same school and are the only Americans to win the Olympic 1500 in the last 116 years.

Their story starts in December 2020, in an empty high school stadium in Southern California. Centrowitz, on the comeback trail from injury, narrowly defeated Hocker, then a 19-year-old redshirt freshman at Oregon with a handwritten bib, to win the B heat of the 5,000 meters at the Sound Running Track Meet, 13:32.92 to 13:32.95. It was a neat little moment, one former Oregon star battling against the next one — though the teenage Hocker probably did not appreciate the 31-year-old Centrowitz sitting and kicking on him in the final mile.

Hocker and Centrowitz’s first career meeting, in December 2020 (photo by Justin Britton)

Flash forward two months and suddenly that teenager was a 3:50 miler. Hocker posted a photo of the race on Instagram, his teammate Carter Christman commented, “@mgcentro your move” and Centrowitz shockingly responded, telling Christman to be more respectful and “go back to pacing your teammates.”

Hocker started destroying everyone in the NCAA, leading to a showdown with Centrowitz at the US Olympic Trials in June, but there was no bad blood. Heck, they even seemed like friends. The two shared a smile as they finished up their semifinal heat, and as they walked off the track, they were, in Centrowitz’s words, “pretty much stroking each other, we were just giving each other kudos.”

via GIPHY

Two days later, Hocker beat Centrowitz in a classic final, producing an iconic celebration image (even if I’m still confused why Hocker felt the need to silence the fans at his home track, Hayward Field). It was very cool in the moment, Hocker ushering in a changing of the guard in American miling by taking down the reigning Olympic champion. But that race hits even harder now that we know Hocker would go on to become an Olympic champion himself three years later. What a neat ending to this story.

Embed from Getty Images

LRC from 2021: DUCK, DUCK, GOOSE: Cole Hocker Takes Down Matthew Centrowitz to Win Men’s 1500 as Yared Nuguse Grabs 3rd

No, Jakob Ingebrigtsen should not give up the 1500 meters

After his defeat in the 1500 meters and his dominant win in the 5,000, I saw a few people suggesting Jakob Ingebrigtsen should abandon the 1500 to focus on the 5,000 and 10,000 meters.

I have a question for all of you: Are you insane?

Yes, if Ingebrigtsen was motivated purely by gold medals, he’d have a better chance at maximizing his total by scrapping the 1500 for the 10,000. He is unbeatable in championship 5,000s and it would not be hard to envision him putting together a Mo Farah-like stretch across the 5,000 and 10,000, particularly now with Cheptegei moving to the roads. 

Even Ingebrigtsen admits that he’s better at the longer stuff.

“I am a half-marathon man,” he told The Times in March. “That’s where I am best. I get a bit worse the further I go down in distance. At 10k I’m a bit worse, and at 5k I’m a bit worse again, and then the same for the 1500m. I’m an endurance athlete. The 1500m is my worst event.”

Ingebrigtsen is in the 1500 for the same reason JFK wanted to go to the Moon: because it is hard. Think about Paris. Which race were you more excited for: the 1500, where Ingebrigtsen might win, or the 5,000, where you knew he would? Legends are born when the very best athletes push their limits, and there would be few things more legendary than Ingebrigtsen winning a global 1500 title and doing it his way, by dropping everyone from the front without a pacer.

Jakob Ingebrigtsen is one of the reasons why the men’s 1500 is the most exciting event in track & field right now. The entire sport is way more fun if he stays put.

Speaking of legends pushing their limits…

The greatest unanswered questions of the Paris Olympics

My greatest unanswered question of the Paris Olympics: how many events could Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone have won?

We saw her win the 400 hurdles easily, in a world record of 50.37 (the sixth of her career!). And she split 47.71 to power the US to gold in the 4×400 relay. If you were to crown an Olympic MVP, it would either be SML or Sifan Hassan.

McLaughlin-Levrone chose to stay in the 400 hurdles this year as she continues to chase the 50-second barrier. But what if she had a Noah Lyles-size appetite for medals? She certainly could have run the mixed 4×400 at the start of the Olympics and delivered another gold for the USA. Could she have won the 200 – an event where she crushed the eventual Olympic champion, Gabby Thomas, earlier this year? What about the 400? Could SML have bettered the 48.17 that Marileidy Paulino ran for gold?

It almost seems greedy to ask more of McLaughlin-Levrone when she runs at such a consistently high level in her main event. But it also seems like a missed opportunity for such a generational talent to limit herself to just one individual event.

My other greatest unanswered questions from Paris 2024:

• What if Noah Lyles didn’t get COVID after the 100 and was healthy for the 200 against Letsile Tebogo?
• What if Athing Mu didn’t get injured this year?
• What if Lamecha Girma did not hit that barrier on the back stretch?
• How much did the snafu entering the stadium on the night of the 100 final really affect Sha’Carri Richardson?
• Would Tyreek Hill have beaten Noah Lyles in the 100? (Kidding, kidding)

The difference .005 can make

Speaking of hypothetical questions, how about this one: what would have happened if the results of the Olympic 100m final were flipped and Kishane Thompson beat Noah Lyles by .005 instead?

Suddenly Lyles goes from the man who delivered on one of the largest hype campaigns in track & field history to the guy who talked the talk but who could not walk the walk on the biggest stage. It’s unfair to penalize Lyles for the 200 in Paris, where he clearly was not 100%, but a defeat in the 100 would have left him with six gold medals from the World Championships but none from the Olympics – a gaping hole on his resume.

Instead, he is the world’s fastest man and has the opportunity to become a megastar as the USA’s first Olympic 100m winner in 20 years. And he likely bumped up his lifetime earning potential by several million dollars now that advertisers and paid speaking gigs can slap the words “Olympic 100m champion” in front of his name for the rest of his life.

The bell was one of the best ideas in recent Olympic history

For this year’s Olympics, Paris 2024 organizers included a new wrinkle: a large bell that each Olympic champion was invited to ring just minutes after winning their event. The bell, inscribed with “Paris 2024” on its exterior, was made specially for the Games and will be donated to the rebuilt Notre-Dame cathedral when it reopens later this year.

I cannot overstate how much I loved this idea. I loved how excited every athlete was to be a part of this new tradition. I loved how loud the bell was (there may have been a microphone assist, but you could hear it clearly throughout the entire stadium). I love that the bell will be put on display at Notre-Dame, one of the world’s most beautiful buildings.

After each final, the physical act of ringing the bell consecrated what we had just seen on the track, each athlete literally ringing in their reign as the Olympic champion for the next four years. It was cool as hell.

My only concern: how are future Olympics meant to follow that? They could bring back the bell in 2028, but it wouldn’t make as much sense for Los Angeles and would feel as if they’re just copying Paris. I’d prefer to see LA organizers dream up their own unique celebration for gold medalists in the Coliseum. They have four years to think of something.

Your move, new track leagues

If you are Alexis Ohanian, Barry Kahn, or Michael Johnson and are about to launch a new professional track venture, you could not have asked for a much better lead-in than what we saw at the Paris Olympics: a ton of fast, compelling races; a nice mixture of established stars winning gold and new, emerging talent breaking through (Julien Alfred, Letsile Tebogo, Emmanuel Wanyonyi); and plenty of American success (helpful considering two of the four GST meets will be held in the US). Millions of Americans now know who Cole Hocker is and why the 1500 meters is such an exciting race.

The question is, will any of that matter?

The Olympics always deliver great races and great athletes. But none of the recent editions have led to any sort of meaningful long-term bump in popularity for the sport. Plenty of people are fans of Olympic track & field. The problem is getting them to care when the word “Olympic” is removed (in the case of these new leagues, you can remove the “& field” as well).

Think about the other sports you watched in Paris. Simone Biles was awesome, right? But I don’t even know what a “regular-season” gymnastics competition looks like, let alone have any desire to watch it. And I’m fine with that. 

Track & field has the same problem. Can any of these ventures – Ohanian’s Athlos, Khan’s Duæl, Johnson’s Grand Slam Track – get fans to care about meets with zero history behind them and no medals at stake?

A few scattered non-track thoughts on Paris and the Olympics

I appreciated the French leaning into their proud history of house music for the soundtrack at many of the venues. Any time Daft Punk came on the PA system (and it happened a lot), I could not help but smile. And the pre-race light show/introductions for the men’s 100m final was one of the best I’ve ever seen, with Kavinsky himself there to serve as DJ as his “Roadgame” played during the intros…Paris is one of the world’s most beautiful cities, and the Olympic organizers made the most of it: beach volleyball at the Eiffel Tower, fencing at the Grand Palais, tennis at Roland Garros, a grueling marathon course that trekked out to Versailles and back. If you’re ever lucky enough to go to an Olympics, and are deciding what to go watch, keep in mind that the venue can contribute to your enjoyment just as much as the sport itself – sometimes more…On my last night before the track & field competition began, I ventured to the Bercy Arena to watch the women’s gymnastics all-around competition, mainly to watch Simone Biles in what could very well be her final Olympics. She delivered on the hype. Biles was actually trailing after two events due to a subpar (for her) uneven bars routine, but she was great on the balance beam and out of this world in the floor exercise. Even I, a gymnastics simpleton, could see how much more elevation and rotation Biles got on her tumbling passes, than the other athletes. She generated so much speed and force off the floor that it was hard to follow exactly what her body was doing; all I knew was that it was impressive as hell…Props to the local organizing committee on taking full advantage of Paris’s Metro system for these Games. In my experience, it was easy to get around town, the stations never felt overwhelmed, venues were (generally) well-marked, and there were plenty of volunteers on hand. On some of the hotter days, they even handed out free water at the Metro stations. I didn’t need to take an Uber or cab the entire week.