After all the trash-talking, all the needling, all the obsessive treatment of a 1500m race as a duel to the death, the two leading men forgot to consider the supporting cast. In perhaps the greatest Olympic final ever staged at this distance, with Jakob Ingebrigtsen but lost the war, denied the ultimate prize by a hard-charging Cole Hocker. The American, who took over three seconds off his personal best to seize a shock gold, did not so much rewrite the script as rip it into a million pieces.
For months, Ingebrigtsen and Kerr had hyped themselves up as the Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier of their event, ready to produce their own Fight of the Century over 33⁄4 laps. Each swaggered out of the tunnel and into the sultry Paris night, gurning for the cameras as if on a ringwalk. But in their fanatical man-marking, in the , they seemed to forget about the wider picture.
And just when Kerr pounced on Ingebrigtsen’s botched tactics to launch his attack, Hocker swept past them both to break the Olympic record. WOW!! 🤯 USA's Cole Hocker just shredded the script! He's taken gold with GB's Josh Kerr in silver. Jakob Ingebrigtsen dropped to fourth! — BBC Sport (@BBCSport) It was a spectacle that deserved capturing for posterity.
Until this final, only six men in history had broken the 3min 28sec barrier. None of the three medallists at Stade de France had done so, with Kerr sandwiched between the US duo of Hocker and Yared Nuguse, a podium nobody had seen coming. For Ingebrigtsen, .