Repechage at the 2024 Olympics: How Many Repechage Athletes Actually Made the Final?

When World Athletics announced back in July 2022 that it was introducing repechage rounds for the 2024 Olympics in Paris, the main question among track fans and athletes was, repe-WHAT?

Then we all read about how it would work, largely replacing time qualifiers with an extra race in every event from the 200 to the 1500, plus both hurdles races. That produced a second question. Why?

In media call in December 2023, World Athletics president Sebastian Coe admitted that the repechage idea was essentially forced on World Athletics by the IOC.

“It was an IOC creation,” Coe said. “It wasn’t something that we chose ourselves. There are pros and cons.”

The pros, Coe said, included the chance for athletes to compete more often — and for fans to see more races.

“Sometimes Olympic programs are a bit thin on the ground,” Coe said. “So it gives our fans in Paris, if they can afford to be there, more of an opportunity to witness our athletes on more occasions.”

To bridge that gap to Paris, World Athletics made several tweaks to the format for last year’s World Championships. Among them was the elimination of time qualifiers in the 1500, steeplechase, and 5,000m — a move that proved universally popular. But the repechage round was left on the sidelines.

“We didn’t feel the need for it in our World Championships in Budapest and I’m not sure we will see the need for it in Tokyo in ’25,” Coe said.

In Paris, few athletes bound for the repechage round openly ripped the idea — hardly surprising. Whether those athletes supported the repechage round or not, by the time they hit the mixed zone, most had already started reframing their mindset to accept their new reality.

“Obviously it puts you at a disadvantage running an extra round, but that’s why you don’t want to go through the repechage,” said American 800m runner Brandon Miller after failing advance in the first round in Paris. “But I’ve gotta play the cards I was dealt and do my best to take advantage of it.”

Australian runner Ollie Hoare, a vocal critic of the repechage in the leadup to the Games, failed to advance from the first round of the 1500 in Paris. After the race, he said he would have accepted his elimination under the old rules but was not going to let another opportunity to qualify go to waste.

“If I had a bad race, not my day, I’m not through then I feel like that’s just the way the sport goes,” Hoare said. “But the repechage is a new thing and another opportunity to race. And anytime you get the opportunity to race, you should probably take it.”

Repechage by the numbers in Paris

So how did the repechage round actually work in Paris? Let’s look at the numbers.

Overall, the repechage rounds added an extra 40 races to the track & field program. So it improved the quantity of some of the morning sessions — if not the quality.

It also changed up the identity of some of the qualifiers. LetsRun.com compared the athletes who would have qualified from the first round had time qualifiers still been in use against the athletes who actually made it via the repechage round (which, it should be noted, also incorporated time qualifiers outside of the 1500).

Number of would-be time qualifiers who advanced from the repechage round in each event:

But the biggest criticism of the repechage rounds was that the second chance it purports to offer is not much of a chance at all. Runners who already were not fast enough to qualify are now being put at an even greater disadvantage by having to run an extra race. On the LetsRun.com Track Talk Podcast, 2016 Olympic Matthew Centrowitz likened it to being sent to the gulag.

“I spent maybe an hour and a half yesterday venting to my wife about this whole new gulag structure,” Centrowitz said on August 4. “I get it, [but] I don’t get it. Clayton Murphy in 2016 got a small q [in the first round] and then ended up medalling. If they had what they had in place now, where he would have had to race the following day while his competition [rests], I don’t think he medals that year.”

Sometimes, the margin between auto qualifiers and time qualifiers is not all that great. In addition to Murphy in the 800 in 2016, Josh Kerr medalled in the Olympic 1500 in 2021 after requiring a time qualifier in the first round.

In 2024, someone in Murphy or Kerr’s position would have been screwed. To make the final in the 800 from the repechage would have required racing four times in four days (first round on Wednesday, repechage on Thursday, semis on Friday, final on Saturday). In the second heat of the repechage 1500, the three qualifiers had to run 3:32, 3:33, and 3:33 — and unsurprisingly finished 9th, 11th, and 11th in their semfinals, their third race in three days.

“We’ve got Kerr and Ingebrigtsen having their feet up while guys are running 3:32 and then we’re going to expect them to come back the next day and take it to them?” Centrowitz said. “No, there’s no shot. It just doesn’t make sense.”

So how did repechage athletes fare in the semifinals in Paris? Not well.

Repechage athletes at the 2024 Olympics

*There was a tie for 2nd in one repechage heat, so both advanced to the semis

Of the 73 athletes who qualified for the semifinals via the repechage round in all events, just two advanced to the final — a qualification rate of 2.7%.

And even that is misleading. One of the repechage athletes who made the final was American 110 hurdler Freddie Crittenden — who intentionally jogged over the hurdles in his first-round heat so as not to aggravate an injury. You can’t blame Crittenden for trying to maximize his chances of success in Paris — by sending himself to the repechage, he gave his body an extra two days to heal, a decision that wound up paying off for him. But Crittenden’s situation is hardly an example of the system working as designed.

It makes sense that few repechage athletes qualified for the final in Paris given the extra race. But how does that compare to athletes in the same position under the old system? How many athletes who needed a time qualifier in the first round of previous Olympics wound up advancing to the final?

Number of small q’s in first round who advanced to the final, 2012-2020 Olympics

None of those rates are high, but they’re all substantially higher than the 2.7% repechage rate we saw in Paris. And the numbers in the table above may be artificially low because in previous years, some events only featured three or four time qualifiers in the first round.

The repechage does seem to have a greater impact on the middle-distance events than the sprints. From 2012-20, 10/36 (27.8%) time qualifiers from the first round of the 1500 wound up making the final. This year in Paris, it was only 1/12 (8.3%). And that makes sense. Sprint prelims are essentially all-out from the gun for everyone except the fastest athletes. Middle-distance races are not, which means a superior athlete could miss out due to a tactical mistake. The repechage round is also more of a punishment for middle-distance athletes as an 800 or 1500m races are more demanding when it comes to recovery than a 200m race.

It’s also worth noting that in the men’s 400, eight of the 19 repechage athletes in Paris (32%) did not even compete in the repechage round, many of them choosing to prioritze the 4×400 relay instead.

Everyone cares so much about the Olympics because the stakes are huge, all the big stars are there, and the results actually matter. The repechage meets none of that criteria. It lowers the stakes of the first round, because anyone who fails to qualify now has a second chance. It introduces a bunch of new races, none of which feature big stars (since they will have qualified automatically). And the repechage results barely matter, because 97% of the runners will be eliminated in the semifinals anyway.

Is it worth keeping a system in place where we run an extra 40 races on the program so that some athletes can have a 1-2% chance of making the final? If you’re the IOC, and your goal is padding the schedule and making sure athletes’ Olympic experience is not limited to one 20-second race, then sure. Paris got 70,000 people to show up for morning sessions, and the repechage did give them something extra to watch.

But for track fans watching from home, the answer should be clear: no.