WayonEPO is about 8x more juiced than the 1500m runners, so yeah, 0% chance of beating him unless he trips. He showed his EPO trck marks when he destroyed all the guys in the Grand Slam track meet. Not fair that he doesn't have out of competition tests and they do.
WayonEPO FTW! He could win the 800-5k, easily, all in the same day. All hail clean Kenya!
Alright Coevett, just be aware that you are alleging a mass conspiracy led by the AIU. They’ve mandated he have at least 3 OOC tests in the 10 months before a championship and shared stats that say the average Kenyan at Worlds has 9 OOC tests, which is nearly 2x the average American and 3x the average Brit who he beat at GST.
In the 800 he has to go up against peak Wanyonyi, meaning a gold medal is very unlikely. It cannot be taken as a given that Hoey will be able to beat Arop, Sedjati, etc.
In the 1500 there is a bevy of 3:27 and 3:28 studs. These guys are probably all better than Hoey in a rabbited race, but Tokyo won't be rabbited. If it is slow, say 3:35, I like Hoey's chances a lot.
The race has to be a certain type of "slow"(er). It's not as simple as just a 3.35 race where they go 1.58, 2.57 (practically walking by todays standards) and then run a 38.0 last 300m.
Hoeys competitive advantage is his 800m ability but physiologically it's his ability to run a 400m faster than anyone else and so much more below his threshold. So if you lined up Hoey, Hocker, Kerr, Nuguse, Kessler, Laros, Habz and said run a 51.0 400m on wavelight, Hoey finishes that race barely crossing his threshold if at all. I don't think it's the same for the others who while they can handle that distance and pace easily, they don't handle it as easily as Hoey.
What Hoey would need to happen is a ramped up version of Paris where the field gets out really quickly (say a low 26 opening 200) and then someone pulling it through in 54.4/54.5 with the main guys biting on it - couple of them below 54, some in the low 55's at least. The second lap can then drop off to 58.0/58.5 which while it's slower and is allowing recovery, is probably not long enough for those guys to really recover - except for Hoey because he was never close to his threshold between 54.5 and 55.0. If that pace can then rise again in the 3rd lap, and then maybe even a 150m segment back at 55.0 pace - maybe approaching the bell to the 1200m point, Hoey as a 3.29 runner still has plenty of strength left to unleash his "field best" anaerobic power/capacity.
So what needs to happen is guys need to make mistakes. Jakob made the mistake in Paris, Hocker did it best because he gave up about a second to Jakob in opening 200m and was just under that through 400m. Did it just happen that way serendipitously or was it planned? Who knows, but every race is a new race and guys make errors for certain reasons all the time.
I don't know if he's more likely to win the 1500m BUT, he does have a unique path that if the race inexplicably went a certain way he could benefit the most from. Interestingly, I don't if he really has one in the 800m. I feel like he would need a handful of guys to really mess up and just do what he does but worse on the day.
Interesting thread topic though - of course it was going to get shot down immediately but it's a good hot take to think about.
In the 800 he has to go up against peak Wanyonyi, meaning a gold medal is very unlikely. It cannot be taken as a given that Hoey will be able to beat Arop, Sedjati, etc.
In the 1500 there is a bevy of 3:27 and 3:28 studs. These guys are probably all better than Hoey in a rabbited race, but Tokyo won't be rabbited. If it is slow, say 3:35, I like Hoey's chances a lot.
😂 Literally no olympic or world championship race in the last 5 years has been slower than 3:29.
This is (clearly) fact - but everything is cyclical in this world and so will "winning 1500m times at the world championships" be too. So sub 3.30 races are not going to be the norm forever and it's still athlete dependent.
For example, if Jakob didn't end up running the 1500 this year, are you absolutely certain someone else is prepared to drive the race home with 1100m to run? I'm not - especially as all these guys have seen the very guy who dominates them on the circuit try and do it for the last 3 major championships and fail each time. All these guys are so used to Jakob taking command of the race I'm not 100% sure they would know what to do if he wasn't there.
Anyway a 3.35 race wouldn't seem likely anyway (because that's a 1.58/9 800m split and that's so slow these days I doubt the field could even collectively run that slow) but a up-and-down tempo race that ends up being 3.31/2 is definitely not inconceivable (which is the style of race I think Hoey could stun a lot of the field in).