High hopes wrote:
"The question now is, ‘How does anyone beat Hocker moving forward?’"
The year is 2019: Woah! Tim Cheruiyot just ran away from everyone for the gold medal! How does anyone beat him?
The year is 2021: My god! Jakob can run 3:28 from the front and out-kicked Cheruiyot for gold! How does anyone beat him?
The year is 2022: Wow! Jake Wightman is strong enough to hang with Jakob and faster over the last 150m. How does anyone beat him?
The year is 2023: Damn! Josh Kerr stuck with Jakob and kicked past home for the gold! How does anyone beat him?
Rinse, repeat
Tim's a tad unfair as he was basically unbeatable from 2018-2020. Bad luck to have two of those three be non-championship years. Truth be told, I never thought that about Jake. He literally got a distant bronze at Comm Games trying to run the same playbook. I suspect we'll start to doubt Hocker similarly if he looks vulnerable in the remaining 2/3 DLs lacking either a kick or being too far back to employ it.
Wightman has definitely been more of a one-hit wonder than expected, but I guess that's down to injuries and the fact that he won so late at age 28. Kerr certainly turned out to not be, but the flaw in thinking he was "unbeatable" was always going to be that he hadn't dropped the crazy-fast time to separate from Nuguse et al., and that his last 100 is good, but never seemed unbeatable (outkicked by Girma, Nuguse on the circuit, holding off rather than smoking Jakob at Pre)
As it stands, it's incredibly competitive but Hocker does have the ace in the hole with his top-end for that last 100.