US miler talks about next steps, the impact of winning Olympic 1500m gold, why Cole Hocker has given himself a tough act to follow and the American influence on middle distance running

As a new father, Matthew Centrowitz is currently experiencing an endurance test very different from those to which he has been more accustomed. “It's mind blowing to me going through this whole process for the first time,” he says through the sleep deprivation caused by the arrival of baby Luka, who was born in mid-November. “I tip my hat to everyone who's a parent and still being a professional athlete.”

The 2016 Olympic 1500m champion is at peace with the fact that he doesn’t have to concern himself with balancing both. A hamstring injury during the summer put paid to the idea of a final French flourish to his athletics career at the 2024 Games but, forced to watch on the from the sidelines at the US Trials, the man who showed his fellow Americans the path to middle distance gold realised the time to step off the track permanently was right.

He would have felt differently had he thought he could have improved the quality of the national team but in Cole Hocker, Yared Nuguse and Hobbs Kessler, the 35-year-old could see that the US had the firepower to be a real threat in Paris.

It was a changing of the guard and the next generation came good on their promise, Hocker upstaging the limelight-hogging duo of defending champion Jakob Ingebrigtsen and world champion Josh Kerr, while Nuguse knocked the Norwegian superstar off the podium entirely to win bronze and Kessler took fifth. 

That performance from the victor and fellow “Duck” – the team University of Oregon students compete for – gave Centrowitz goosebumps. Hocker reached the promised land in a very different way to his predecessor – scorching down the inside with a late charge to break the Olympic record with a run of 3:27.65 that was far removed from the tactically astute 3:50.00 that had landed the title in Rio eight years previously – but Centrowitz knew exactly what the 23-year-old was, and is, experiencing.

The latter had become the first US athlete to win 1500m Olympic gold since 1908 and wrapping his head around the achievement, as well as what followed, continues to be something that has eluded him.  

“I heard [Cole] on a podcast recently talking about the disbelief he was feeling after [winning Olympic gold] and it just brought back 2016 memories for me, feeling the same way,” says Centrowitz. “It’s something that I don't know if it will ever set in – for me, it sometimes still feels like it hasn't set in – so I would imagine, only a few months removed from Paris, that he still might be walking around in disbelief and it might be that way for a really long time.”

Hocker has been faced with the trickiest of situations to negotiate. He might have achieved every athlete’s dream but is now faced with the dilemma of whether to plunge fully into savouring and celebrating the moment he has worked so hard for, or getting busy with the follow-up. 

“People want more of you [when you win Olympic gold],” says Centrowitz. “It’s not just in the running world, but outside of that, family members and friends all want your time and energy. Plus, it's definitely easier getting to the top than staying at the top and it’s something that, once you get there, it's hard to keep the hunger and it's hard to duplicate and replicate a performance that is already hard enough as it is. 

“To win a world title or an Olympic title is extremely hard and then when you try to multiply that by two… there's a reason why Seb Coe is the only back-to-back, two-time Olympic 1500m champion. It's a very hard event to win at. 

“I'm sure Cole’s being pulled everywhere. He's been at the University of Oregon getting honoured. He's been back in Indiana and his home state getting honoured, and it's a difficult thing, because you put in all those days and hours in the gym, on the track and on the trails for moments and opportunities like this. And then when you get them it’s like: ‘Well s**t, the World Championships are in less than a year, so do I take advantage of some of these opportunities?’. I'm not even talking about the lucrative ones. It’s the ones that involve going back to your home town, for instance. They want a piece of that, and you want to share that with people you grew up with and were part of that success. But you're also thinking: ‘Is this what's best for my training?’ You’ve got the devil and the angel on your shoulders and one's telling you: ‘Yeah, man. Go and enjoy this’ but then the other is like: ‘Dude, you haven't done a workout in three days – you need to get back to training’.

“He's going to find that it's going to be difficult to lock in again. That doesn’t necessarily mean that he can't go back and win another Olympic title or win the World Championships this year, but he has a target on his back.”

It will indeed be a different scenario that greets the champion.

“He's no longer an underdog, and [having been in that position] will definitely have helped a little bit,” adds Centrowitz. “It means not having as much pressure on you, you're going through the media zone during the prelims and the semis and the questions are a lot different than the ones that Kerr and Ingebrigtsen were getting, so things like that add up. He’s going to find that his life has completely changed, but that’s where you want to be.”

One of the things that Centrowitz loved most about athletics was that success or failure came down to the internal battle with himself. No-one else was going to run the training session or win the race for him, after all. The flipside is that keeping the inner fire stoked also comes down to one person.

“It was harder to really be hungry and stay motivated day in and day out after 2016 and I'm sure Cole’s going to find the same thing,” adds Centrowitz, who went out in the first round at the 2017 World Championships. “You can say: ‘I haven't won a world title, I want to break the world record’ but it's one thing to say and it's another to be hungry day in and day out and live and breathe 3:26.00.

“It's hard to be like: ‘I'm looking four years in advance when I have all this in front of me right now’ so it was really hard after 2016 to gear up and be ready for another World Championships that following year.”

How Hocker manages to follow up his day of days adds another element of intrigue to an event already blessed with subplots. There are the dynamics at play between the athletes themselves to start with, but 1500m running also continues to evolve – and speed up – at a remarkable rate. 

“It has changed tremendously and the biggest change for sure is the pace of the races,” says Centrowitz. “When I started as a professional runner in 2011, between 3:34 and 3:36 at most of the World Championships and Olympic Games until 2016 was generally what won it, but now it's significantly under 3:30 and 3:31 is a tactical race now.

“I've seen comments from people who think that 2016 was the reason why that's changed. Maybe, maybe not. [2019 world champion] Tim Cheruiyot was the first time you saw someone front run from start to finish. [World record-holder] Hicham El Guerrouj didn't even do that, he would take it on halfway through, so Tim was the first person and obviously the way Ingebrigtsen trains, it suited him really well and it benefited him at the Tokyo Olympics. From that point on, it was like: ‘Okay, now, if you want to be competitive, you have to be a very good 5000m runner, or you have to be able to run a really good 5000m and you have to be very strong’.

“College kids and high school kids [now] would look at my training and laugh but we trained for tactical races, because that's what you needed to train for. I'm sure, if I was running competitively right now in the 1500m, we would have to train exactly the way everyone else is training for a 3:27, 3:28, 3:29 race by the third round. 

“Everything is cyclical and I think, in a few years, you'll see it go back [to more tactical races]. That's my belief. I think you'll see a new wave of runners where it becomes tactical again then again [a few years after that] we’ll go back to running from the gun.

“But it makes for exciting track and field. I think it's great when there are new runners that step up and I think it's great when there are different types of races, but I'm obviously biased. I find the tactical ones more entertaining than the fast ones, but that’s just me.”

The current need for speed, however, doesn’t mean an athlete can just disengage their brain when it comes to championship racing. 

“You need to be a gamer,” agrees Centrowitz “and Cole is exactly that type of athlete. Even though he boasts the 3:27 Olympic record at the end of the day he's still a racer, which makes him very, very special. It makes him the Olympic champion, and makes him very hard to beat, because he's not a guy that just goes in there and is known for running fast times. He's known for competing regardless of how fast it is and I promise you, with 100m to go, he had no idea how fast they were running. He was just like: ‘I gotta beat these guys. I can beat these guys’. You can't just be a time trialist. You have to have that competitive, winning instinct and the NCAA does that here in the US.”

It’s here where we touch on a key component to the current middle distance landscape. When you examine the sharp end and look at the number of top athletes to have come through the US college system – Kerr included – or the number of athletes who spend a chunk of each year at a Stateside training venue, the American influence becomes substantial.

“A lot of these guys have run in the NCAA at one point and at a young age you practice that winning is more important than junior records,” says Centrowitz, who believes that Kessler will be crowned the next Olympic champion on home soil in LA in 2028. “That translates into titles and medals and when you have a handful of athletes doing it, it makes you believe that you can as well. The US team is firing on all cylinders right now and there are medal threats in every event.”

But while the athletes tackle their next mission, what lies in store for Centrowitz now – besides fatherhood, of course? The idea of coaching doesn’t appeal but, after a couple of internships, the competitive world of finance does. There is a desire to keep in touch with the sport that has dominated his life in some shape or form but, whatever he chooses to do, in common with his previous life he will still be pursuing something intangible.

“It goes back to that feeling of disbelief about winning the Olympics,” he says. “That feeling is one I really wish everyone could experience because you really can't describe it. You get goosebumps thinking about it and that's what drives you. You want that feeling again.

“It's going to be extremely hard to duplicate that, so I'm going to be chasing that feeling for the rest of my life – whether it's in parenthood, in finance or in something else.”