For people in general? The 100m dash! That is the length of a full football field in under 10 seconds! Every American knows how amazing that is. You are the "fastest man on Earth" and your 40y would also win the NFL Combine. And you are probably yoked/jacked, so you are hyper-masculine as well.
For me personally? The 1500m was my event and is still my favorite event to watch. I would want to be the 1500m World Champ.
But if you are talking Olympics, then the marathon would be my personal pick. Olympic + Marathon = the true spirit of our sport.
It would be interesting to see the results of an athlete poll on this question. Notably, Kipchoge only switched to the marathon when he was no longer competitive on the track.
Personally, I would have loved to be an Olympic Gold Medalist in the 800m meters. You’re a sprinter, but you’re not. You’re a distance runner but you’re not. You are a badass hybrid of both. Anyone who has a run that event knows the absolutely horrible feeling of that race, so to do it better than anyone on the planet counts for something.
But the consensus is 100m.
I also love the 1500m. But most non-runners and some runners could care less about that event.
Since you are asking for opinions there is no one right answer. For me it's World cross country champion. At least in the past, it drew big names from 1500 to marathon to one race, which I found really cool. Last year had even 800 star Wanyonyi on the winning mixed relay team, though admittedly that's not the main race.
The 100m sucks. People only care about it because the TV hypes it so much. They will devote 9 hours of broadcasting time to build suspense for an event that barely takes 9 seconds.
The event that people actually respond to on their own initiative is the 400m. In the 400, nobody has ran away with it by 3/4 of the way through. In the 400, things don't change in the blink of an eye. In the 400, you can take your time to watch all the runners and see everything unfold, without it taking too long and being boring. In the 400, you know they are tying up on the homestretch and anything can happen! Even non-runners can see them at their limit and can relate to it.
The 4x400m relay is beyond any dispute the most exciting and crowd-pleasing event in all track.
The 400 is the longest event that is never "tactical" i.e. boring AF and the crowd hates it and the TV cuts away to the field events.
You are right. I assumed the "quarter mile" was the coolest thing ever in high school but found out later that the "world's fastest man" thing is what everyone really cared about.
So while I agree with you (esp. on the 4x400), that is just us. The rest of humanity seems to think Bolt is 1000x better than Michael Johnson or Wade Van Niekirk.
We are "right" but we are not the arbiters of what other people like. They like the 100m.
p.s. I still like the 1500 the most but that is just me.
Since you are asking for opinions there is no one right answer. For me it's World cross country champion. At least in the past, it drew big names from 1500 to marathon to one race, which I found really cool. Last year had even 800 star Wanyonyi on the winning mixed relay team, though admittedly that's not the main race.
There is, in fact, a right answer and it has been covered extensively in this thread.
What I didn’t know is that there was a worst answer, but you found it. I can’t imagine anything LESS cool than World XC champ. County XC champ is cooler. Best runner on your high school team is cooler.