The Olympics of Post-Olympics T&F Newsletters ⏱

Aug 21, 2024

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This week’s newsletter was compiled by David Melly and Paul Snyder.

How To Appreciate The Rest Of The Season, Post-Olympics ⏭️

The men’s 1500m final at the Paris Olympics. (Photo by Kevin Morris / @Kevmofoto)

The 2024 Olympic Games are done. They’re over. Gold medals have been draped around necks, national anthems played, dreams realized/deferred (dried up in the sun, etc.), and statuses established, cemented, and/or called into question. It was a lot. You’re excused if you’ve found yourself nursing a bit of a track and field hangover from the whole shebang. In an ideal world, governed by an ideal calendar, the track and field “regular season” would precede the big global championship each year. But that’s not the world we live in. Instead what we get is a regular season that weirdly straddles the big global championship.

Fortunately for sports fans who appreciate a non-linear narrative arc to a season, the Diamond League is back and ramping up toward its own, unrelated conclusion. Tomorrow in Lausanne, Switzerland, track and field fans will be treated to a high-quality meet featuring all your favorite pros. And, somewhat confusingly, there’s not even a whole week before the next big showdown in Silesia, Poland, on Sunday.

And while tuning into a non-Olympic track meet while there’s still all kinds of Paris content on your feed can feel like a sort of hollow ritual, it really doesn’t have to be. There’s still plenty of reasons to fire up the ol’ Peacock app on your Roku (at least for the rest of 2024…).

First, there’s the obvious reason: it’s track and field, and as a reader of a track and field newsletter, you presumably like to watch it. Go ahead and tune in for two hours – you’re going to have a nice time! The Diamond League isn’t perfect, but packing a high quality program into an easily digestible television window is its biggest selling point.

But the real draw is the potential to witness a statement performance. None of the standalone results in Lausanne are likely to be career-defining, unless someone channels their Olympic-peak fitness into a world record in Switzerland – unlikely, but not impossible with reigning world record holder Yaroslava Mahuchikh in the high jump and Grant Holloway perpetually hundredths away from history in the hurdles. More likely is someone using Lausanne for one of two purposes: to prove their Olympic success wasn’t a fluke, or to prove their Olympic failure was.

Grant Holloway will have another shot at breaking the 110m hurdles world record at the Lausanne Diamond League. (Photo by Kevin Morris / @Kevmofoto)

Take the men’s 1500m for instance. A gold medalist returning to the oval office, an enormous target on their back, can really shore up their legacy by dispatching of all challengers. If you’re Cole Hocker, you’re looking to take down Jakob Ingebrigtsen for the second straight race. In a paced setup – where Ingebrigtsen himself isn’t the de facto pacer – can Hocker still pull it off? Hocker’s kick is already legendary. But now he’s entering races with a 3:27 already under his belt.

If you’re Ingebrigtsen, well… proving the doubters wrong is more of a challenge as you already have a reputation as somebody who performs best in rabbited Diamond League races – but you surely don’t to want to rack up a second L. And the best revenge available is to move even further up the all-time list, where Ingebrigtsen currently sits at #4. Then there’s somebody like Hobbs Kessler. Nobody’s saying Kessler was an undeserving fifth-place finisher in Paris, but he’s only got one sub-3:30 1500m to his name, and sticking close on the leaders here will help demonstrate he’s ascended into international medal contention for good.

The men’s 1500m is full of intriguing plotlines, but it’s hardly the exception in a meet stacked top to bottom with talent fresh from Paris in search of a narrative-defining performance.

In the men’s 400m, Matthew Hudson-Smith, is looking for redemption in the form of another 43-point showing after seeing gold slip through his fingertips; he’ll be taking on a loaded field that includes American relay hero Vernon Norwood.
Yemisi Ogunleye returns to the ring to back up her gold in the women’s shot put, where she’ll face silver medalist Maddi Wesche and a whole slew of North American throwers who underperformed or missed out on the Games entirely. Ogunleye is only the fourth-farthest thrower in the field and if you’re Sarah Mitton, Chase Jackson, or Jessica Schilder, you’re probably hoping to channel your medal-missing rage into one or more huge throws.
In the 100m hurdles, though Olympic champ Masai Russell isn’t lining up, we’ll get a rematch of the second, third, fourth, fifth, and seventh-placers. The 100H crew stays racing head-to-head!
No Keely? No problem. The women’s 800m is headlined by Mary Moraa, fresh of a bronze finish in Paris, Shafiqua Maloney, who finished fourth in a big breakthrough, and Georgia Bell, the UK’s latest rising star, plus a handful of runners looking to put the Olympics in the rearview, like Jemma Reekie, Nia Akins, and Natoya Goule-Toppin.
Letsile Tebogo returns to the 200m, where he’ll look to make quick work of an American delegation composed of Fred Kerley and Erriyon Knighton. Tebogo will likely be judged not by his place (he’s heavily favored to win) but by how low he can go – another performance under 19.5 would really call into question whether Noah Lyles could’ve even beaten the Botswanan if he were fully healthy.

Don’t miss these events, and more! You can watch the meet live tomorrow on Peacock from 2:00-4:00 p.m. ET. Check out the schedule and full list of entries here.

How To Cash In On Newfound Fame, Post-Olympics 💸

Sifan Hassan at the Paris Olympics. (Photo by Kevin Morris / @Kevmofoto)

Now that the Olympics have come and gone and the rest of the world has met our favorite track and field stars, the next step for every agent worth their salt is clear: how do we cash in on this 15 minutes of fame?

There’s only so much room on a Wheaties box, but with the advent of social media, athletes have more opportunities than ever before to pick up some postseason spending money with a well-timed brand partnership. But rather than stick to the boring stuff – running shoes, GPS watches, and fueling gels – we’re thinking bigger. Shill, baby, shill!

Sifan Hassan x Strava: The undisputed Local Legend of the Stade de France has to be Sifan Hassan, after the Dutchwoman clocked 50 laps across two track events and then came back at the end of the competition to snag the segment crown on the Olympic marathon course. Given that we can barely keep track of all of Hassan’s race efforts, getting her to start logging her runs in an easily-accessible app might help the fans follow along as well.

Quincy Hall x Fruit of the Loom: Olympic champ Quincy Hall didn’t just turn heads with his incredible come-from-behind 43.40 victory in the 400m final… he also went viral when he was caught on camera in the call room stepping into his speed suit over a pair of conventional, baggy boxer shorts. While some questioned the strange combination of heavy cotton under skin tight spandex, there’s clearly an opportunity here for Fruit of the Loom to rebrand its classic products as performance athletic wear.

Gudaf Tsegay x Everlast Boxing Gloves: Who can forget one of the most controversial events in the first days of athletics in Paris, when a bit of argy-bargy between Faith Kipyegon and Gudaf Tsegay during the 5000m final resulted in a perplexing disqualification, then reinstatement, of the eventual silver medalist. While the water may be under the bridge following the Ethiopian’s post-race apology to her Kenyan rival, there’s a clear career pivot to be made for Tsegay should she want to pursue a totally different sport in 2028.

Grant Holloway x Dom Perignon: Holloway is famously a big wine connoisseur, and now that the 3x World 110m hurdles champ has the Olympic title to match, he’ll have plenty to celebrate. The classiest way to say “I won gold in Paris” is obviously to take a champagne shower in the most famous of French sparkling wines.

Dakotah Lindwurm x Zola: Team USA’s top Olympic marathoner got engaged at the finish line. What better way to beat the post-Paris blues than starting wedding planning? And what better way to channel your personal life experience into a money making scheme than hitching your wagon to the famously-expensive wedding-industrial complex?

Jamaican Athletics x AstroTurf: Given that four of Jamaica’s six Olympic medals came from the infield this cycle, the federation responsible for athletics greatness in the island nation should probably start investing in field events in more ways than one. They can start by partnering with an artificial grass brand to give their jumpers, throwers, and multi-event athletes the best competition surfaces money can buy.

An Argument For The “Falmouth Double” 🏃🏃

Fentaye Azale, Melknat Sharew, and Emma Bates atop the Falmouth Road Race podium. (Photo by Meghan Murphy / @meghanmurphyphotography)

On Sunday, August 18th, 12,000 or so runners raced seven miles along the south shore of Cape Cod to complete the 52nd Falmouth Road Race. John Korir took the men’s race in 31:15, winning by nearly a full minute, and Fentaye Azale outkicked Melknat Sharew by a stride to take the crown in the women’s race. It’s a well-timed tune-up for Chicago-bound runners like Korir and Emma Bates, the third-place finisher and top American woman.

Road racing fans have likely heard of the Falmouth Road Race. In fact, it’s likely one of the few non-marathon road races a casual American fan has heard of. But far fewer people closely follow the Falmouth Elite Mile that takes place at the local high school up the road two days prior. This year’s winner of the women’s race, Puma Elite’s Dorcas Ewoi, set a meet record of 4:23.11, leading the top six under 4:30, and Henry Wynne of the Brooks Beasts took the men’s victory in 3:53.79.

The mile comes at a weird time in the cycle for track specialists. You’re either trying to keep the last legs of your mid-summer taper going through 5th Ave or one last trip to Europe, or you’re trying to gear up again and get back into fall training. As such, many of the mile entrants looking for a little extra strength work (or a fun jog along the water) choose to hop in the seven-mile race the next day. Seven miles of rolling hills definitely requires a different skill set than middle-distance closing speed, but there are a special few athletes who can find success at both ends of the spectrum.

Morgan Beadlescomb finished fifth in the road race on tired legs after a sixth-place 3:55.80 finish in the mile, beating out Wynne by three places and 59 seconds in their rematch. That’s still a good showing for the Seattle-based miler, however, who rarely runs road races of the non-mile variety. He finished a step ahead of Dark Sky Distance’s Kasey Knevelbaard, who missed out on prize money in the mile but picked some up in the road race with a pair of ninth-place finishes.

The women weren’t quite as successful doubling back as the men – probably because their elite field in the road race was much deeper, with runners like Edna Kiplagat, Natosha Rogers, and Susanna Sullivan rounding out the top 10. Massachusetts local Helen Schlachtenhaufen was the top double-finisher with a fourth-place 4:26.76 in the mile and a 12th-place 39:00 run in the road race (that’s 5:35 mile pace). The only other woman to complete the double was Kayley Delay, the steeplechase specialist who clocked a seventh place / 14th place Friday-Sunday combo.

You don’t get extra prize money for finishing high at both races – but maybe you should. (In the spirit of the preceding section, ideally a sponsor emerges in the form of Boston-area home services company that prides itself on “consistent results.”) Not only does multi-day off-distance racing allow the fans an extra shot at cheering on their favorite runners at one event, it’s great preparation for all sorts of skills we should want to encourage in the American talent pipeline: racing through rounds, developing range, doubling at championships, etc. If it’s good enough for Sifan Hassan, it’s good enough for us!

It’s unlikely we’ll see many 1500m/10,000m doubles at next year’s U.S. championships and, Hassan notwithstanding, it’s not quite as easy for most athletes to pull off a combo that includes a marathon – so don’t expect elite doubles at Boston, New York, or Chicago. But as we look for new and creative ways to showcase the best track athletes on the roads, sticking them in front of a built-in audience of thousands of mass-participation runners and their families, the opportunity to get more mileage, both literally and figuratively, out of events like Falmouth offers a model worth exploring more.

Noah Lyles Has A Lot To Say 🗣️

Noah Lyles at the Paris Olympics. (Photo by Kevin Morris / @Kevmofoto)

Noah Lyles has been called many things by fans and critics alike, but one thing’s for sure: he’s never been accused of being shy.

The newly-minted Olympic 100m champ has never walked past a microphone in silence, and when he does speak, he’s a seemingly endless source of quotes both thought-provoking and controversial. And unlike most track and field athletes not named Usain Bolt, Noah’s comments often often get coverage from the wider sports media world. For better or worse, you don’t often hear about Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone or Grant Fisher getting in beefs with NBA players.

Last weekend, Lyles appeared on a YouTube show called “Nightcap” to speak with NFL alumni Shannon Sharpe and Chad “Ochocinco” Johnson about his Olympic experience and the sporting public’s reaction to it (Think CITIUS MAG Live but for football). Topics covered included competing with COVID at the Olympics, potentially joining the Grand Slam Track league, controversies with NBA star Anthony Edwards, his response to a race challenge from the NFL’s Tyreek Hill, and his world record potential in the 400m. That’s like, a decade’s worth of headlines by your average track and field pro’s standards rolled out in one evening.

Love him or hate him, Lyles is a tremendous source of content. And whether you’re NBC, USATF, or a scrappy little online newsletter, success of the sport is ultimately not measured in how beloved your stars are: it’s measured in eyeballs and the dollars those eyeballs generate. The Lyles fandom would argue he’s working harder than anyone in the sport to raise track and field’s profile on the world stage. A cynical viewer could look at Noah Lyles’s media strategy and come to the conclusion that he’s deliberately saying things he knows will gin up controversy in order to get attention… and you know what? Both things can be true.

After winning the Olympic 200m title, Letsile Tebogo generated a little controversy of own when asked if he had any desire to become the new face of track and field, saying, "I think, for me, I can't be the face of athletics because I'm not an arrogant or a loud person like Noah. So, I believe Noah is the face of athletics." While keeping in mind that Tebogo was not communicating in his first language and that the connotation of words like ‘arrogant’ may have been lost in translation, the point is nevertheless an interesting one: being the face of the sport of track and field is not necessarily about being the fastest. That’s part of the equation, but gold medals alone will never be enough to dominate headlines and airtime. And if part of what runners like Tebogo want is to be paid a lot of money and for a lot of people to watch them race, being one lane over from Noah Lyles certainly doesn’t hurt.

Ultimately, there will be some “hot takes fatigue” if Lyles isn’t able to keep delivering the performances to back up his comments. But while he’s on top of the world at the same time as track rides an Olympic-sized wave of media coverage, Lyles getting on camera and being deliberately inflammatory seems to be paying off for the sport as a whole.

Getting The Lead(ville) Out ⛰️

Whenever we relegate the results of a major ultramarathon to the rapid fire highlights ( 🔥!) section of the newsletter, we invariably get a handful of emails asking why we don’t give the longest distances more respect and airtime.

Well, this is a track and field an athletics newsletter. And it’s pretty obvious to anyone who follows both sports that mountain/ultra/trail racing is its own discipline, related, but entirely distinct from, the sort of distance running housed under the umbrella of athletics. In some ways, the relationship is comparable to athletics’ connections to the triathlon: the best athletes have similar skill sets, and talent in one sport can translate to success in the other – but not always.

This past weekend in Colorado, at the Leadville 100 David Roche broke the course record by over 16 minutes, finishing in 15 hours, 26 minutes, and 34 seconds. This was one of American ultrarunning’s most coveted records, and it fell in Roche’s debut at the 100-mile distance. (If the name David Roche sounds familiar, he’s perhaps better known as a coach than an athlete… if you’ve got a buddy who’s a serious trail runner, there’s at least a solid chance they’ve been coached by him!) In terms of debuts, it really can’t go much better than this.

The women’s record – Ann Trason’s 1994 18:06:24 clocking – lives to see another day, but Mary Denholm came closer than anyone ever has to giving it a scare when she crossed the finish line in 18:23:51. Denholm, who is also a private running coach by trade, qualified for the 2024 Olympic Marathon Trials.

A bit about the course: It’s an out-and-back that undulates between 9,200 and 12,620 feet above sea level. By the time you’ve gone out 50 miles, sighed, turned around, and hobbled across the finish back in Leadville – elevation 10,119 feet, and nicknamed “the two-mile high city” – you’ve climbed and descended a total of over 18,000 feet. While that probably sounds horrible, Leadville’s profile is sort of the Goldilocks option of the North American “Big Three.” Western States is the most “runnable” one (altitude is negligible and it’s net downhill) while Hardrock is the widowmaker: there’s over 33,000 feet of climbing involved, all at an average elevation of 11,000 feet.

The criticism that always gets raised when us tracksters talk about impressive ultra running accomplishments is simple: that sticking Tamirat Tola or Sifan Hassan in Leadville would make fools of the world’s best 100-mile runners. And while it’s true that mountain, ultra, and trail racing is a younger, smaller, and less accessible sport than marathon running, you can’t simply assume that distance-running talent translates infinitely upward. Think of it this way: a sprinter like Gabby Thomas is more likely to be good at the 800m than, say, Sha’Carri Richardson, but there’s a good chance she might suck at it just as much. And until Gabby toes the line of a middle-distance race, we’ll never know for sure.

There are certainly hallmarks of ultrarunning potential to be found in road racing: ability to thrive over hills, strength at 26.2 versus 13.1, and tolerance for heavy fueling are three big ones. Someone like Sharon Lokedi or Molly Seidel, who translated 10,000m success on the track into marathon prowess and whose best results come on tough courses like NYC, has shown at least a passing mastery of the tools needed to win a race like Leadville. But then again, one of the biggest rising stars in the ultra world is 2022 Western States champ Adam Peterman, a former steeplechaser for Colorado who’d never run a marathon on the roads before his 100-mile debut.

So until Eliud Kipchoge decides to take on David Roche, we’ll keep operating under the assumption that the best ultrarunners in the world are, well, the best runners who run ultras. And if you want to prove us wrong, Eliud, I’m sure the good people of Leadville, Colorado, would love to have you.

Rapid Fire Highlights 🔥

Defending champions Tamirat Tola and Hellen Obiri will headline the 2024 New York City Marathon. (Photo by Kevin Morris / @Kevmofoto)

– The elite fields have been announced for the 2024 New York City Marathon, headlined by newly-crowned Olympic champ Tamirat Tola and Olympic bronze medalist Hellen Obiri, both of whom happen to be the defending NYC champs from 2023. Notable Americans in the field include Paris Olympians Dakotah Lindwurm, Conner Mantz, and Clayton Young.

– The aforementioned Silesia Diamond League meet happening Sunday, August 25 will feature as many big stars as Lausanne, including Mondo Duplantis, Karsten Warholm, Ryan Crouser, and Femke Bol.

– The AIU (Athlete Integrity Unit) has filed an appeal with the Swiss-based international Court of Arbitration for Sport challenging an independent arbitrator’s decision to overturn Erriyon Knighton’s provisional suspension by USADA. Knighton, who placed fourth in the 200m in Paris, tested positive for the banned substance trenbolone back in March, which the arbitrator ruled was likely caused by contaminated meat.

– Gabby Thomas confused many casual fans of track and field by revealing on the TODAY Show that, despite her Olympic gold medal in a running event, the 200-meter specialist never runs more than one mile at a time in training.

– The permanent display of Mondo Duplantis’s pole vault world record height installed in Avesta, Sweden, has been formally raised a centimeter after the 2x Olympic champion broke his own world record with a 6.25m jump in the final.