Josh Hoey profile by JG

Great article. Gault is my favorite. Sounds like Josh made a terrible mistake relying on his father to hire (and subsequently fire) so many coaches. I don't believe any of the 5 coaches had any experience coaching a pure 800 runner so wondering what the father was thinking wasting the best years of his son's career. 800 runners usually peak in their early '20s. Hoey is old for an 800 runner.

I don't know if we can say he's spoiled until he's retired from sport. If he does nothing, then he is lazy and spoiled.

Imagine going all in with the track, coaches, etc. in this way in an obscure sport no one cares about unless it's the Olympics. Seems like a waste of resources, esp. since similar talents do more with less.

Just finished part 1, I just find it odd with all those resources why he won't move to flag staff or Park City or Boulder or something sooner for training. Now he training in Flag but I found that odd. Altitude was known to have benefits back then.

The 3 brother thing is nice and somewhat concerning. As someone with brothers, it is a lot of pressure to put on an 18 year old. Kind of stupid honestly. His brothers should of gone to college and discovered some independence. It doesn't have to be Oregon but something more local. I mean Penn State has had a lot of great 800m runners come from there.

Also the investment in track is wild to me. I mean they won't recoup the money spent. Maybe in other pro sports - but in track it is Olympic Gold or bust. Only 1 person gets to win the 800m.

Happy Josh found success but they seemed to over complicate it a bit. You don't need a specific coach to be great.

I agree with you. PEDs also help runners who like to push all the time like Hoey. Drugs let you get away with that since you don't mess up your hormones and can recover faster. Really the whole point of drugs.

. Let’s say they spend 10m bucks and make 1 million. Was that a good investment? a poor person goes nope they lost 9 million. A rich person it was a great investment. I traded something I had plenty of (money) for something I didn’t have (athletic glory). For the rest of their lives they can talk about being world champion and all they had to do was spend some cash that they have plenty of.

Now I would really like to hear Mahons story about what went wrong. Dude coaches from 7th grade til he goes pro and then isn’t excited to have him in the group? Seems really odd. And I find it hard to believe that given that familiarity that he suddenly upped the volume a huge amount. You sort of wonder if some stuff was done outside of what Mahon wanted.

I made it through the first page of replies before giving up.

Spell b-i-t-t-e-r; spell e-n-v-y.

The ability to earn obscene amounts of money with minimal taxes for minimal value creation in American society is where we should focus our attention, not on a guy going 100% in on the family dream of track greatness. I sure hope there is no doping involved because it's a great story if there isn't.

the father seems like a typical dem who just keeps throwing more money at a situation to make it better, but it never improves; finally finding the right coach may have done it, but all the money wasted did not help.

Well, we got to like ~4.5 pages before this turned political. Not bad, LetsRun! Time to let this thread turn into like 3 posters calling each other names.

It's definitely an interesting story, but I think even more interesting is the reaction to it. It seems like people really love the status quo.

What would the reaction be if shoe companies or USATF poured these resources into their individual athletes? Would we applaud it because that's the way it has always been done--that athletes are sponsored by shoe companies?

A cynical take on the status quo is that the shoe companies are only sponsoring athletes because they think it might benefit their bottom line. They support as little as they can to turn the athletes into a walking (running?) billboard.

But here we have a family pouring a lot of their own resources into an athlete without expecting some kind of financial return, and many commenters take issue with the idea that Hoey's family is supporting him. In a perfect world, every athlete would have the resources to do what the Hoeys have done, but this isn't a perfect world, and it never will be. To have issue with a family that is chasing a dream in an imperfect world seems misguided to me.

As for the idea that his improvement can only be attributed to PEDs, well, when he gets popped, you can come back here and gloat, and prove that you were right. We're back to the status quo, though: "You ran 1:47 in 2018 and stagnated? There's no way you can run 1:43 seven years later. You can only progress a certain amount of time each year or you're using PEDs. That's what most other people have done."

TL;DR: The story is interesting, but the reaction says more. We want our athletes to improve, but only by a certain amount in a certain time frame. We want our athletes to be supported and given great resources, but only by USATF and shoe companies and only up to a certain amount.

If you have an issue with how much the Hoey family spends on supporting their children, tell me how much would be okay for them to spend. What should be the limit?

The Hoey family seems to already have access to just about anything money could buy.

The three sons are set for life, they could just about do whatever they want with their time/energy/money.

We should be celebrating the fact that they chose to pursue the very difficult and elusive dream of mid distance running success at the global level, instead of just partying and doing drugs/alcohol like so many other sons of rich parents seem to end up doing.

They also are trying to make their running dream become reality as a family, which is also unique and notable.

The running dream they have chosen to pursue is primarily obtained not by spending money (such as success in sailboat, automobile or horse racing) but through many hours of training, sweat, toil and effort.

Didn't you get the feeling his Dad was the one making all of those decisions? I'm not sure it's fair to call Josh a diva when he was just being plunged into a coaching situation and then ripped out of the situation by his dad a few months later.

My dad was always discouraging about pursuing running. "It'll ruin your knees," blah blah. He didn't come to my meets. The only one I remember him attending was state XC my senior year. There may have one or two others, but the absences dominate my memory. I won a lot of track races, and my parents never saw any of them.

So from my perspective, it's pretty cool to see a dad lending so much support to what his kid is good at.

I've also been fairly defensive of Hoey progression. I'm as skeptical as anyone here and wouldn't be shocked at all if a drug bust followed any of the top US runners, including Hoey.

But talent doesn't go away, and Hoey is one of the most talented HS 800m guys of all time. If there's anyone on the planet who could make a clean jump (however delayed) from 1:47 to top-3 in the world, it's Hoey.

So I'm cautiously optimistic he's clean. And I completely disagree with anyone saying it's obvious or blatant. Simply put, he has the talent for it to make sense.

While I understand it, I do find it a little frustrating that the discussion of Hoey has basically boiled down to people cynically assuming he's doped. I also get the extra suspicion because of the abundance of resources his family has but don't tons of poor Kenyans also get dope just fine? I guess the argument would be that those guys don't have the resources/USADA protection to keep from getting caught. Whatever, it does come with the territory of a massive performance spike and people from the outside looking in. Same with the discussion of the family dynamic, both with the brothers and with the dad. While it may sound overbearing and like the other brothers are being forced to follow Josh, we ultimately have no idea what their family life is like.

What I wish would get talked about more was the idea that someone with so much talent could stagnate with such physical and mental issues. I think everyone on here knows how bipolar running can be: when it's great, everything kind of clicks and it's easy; but when things start getting rough, suddenly even the most basic things can get called into question. Now, magnify this as a high schooler who just signed a pro contract, has running as his sole focus in life, and has a devoted (using a nice word because I don't know the situation well enough from the outside to warrant otherwise) family supporting him. I can see that if things aren't going well, you're going to start to question and change things. Then that becomes an issue but it's hard to see in the moment.

It actually reminded me of the early years of Donovan Brazier as a pro. He initially was with Johnny Gray training in Florida. I know Dwayne Solomon was in the group but I don't know if anyone else was. Brazier was 19/20 years old, moved to a new state, and was the only young guy on the team. So while Dwayne was spending time with his family away from practice, Donovan was just by himself. It sounded miserable. I'm sure Josh had plenty of times like that with Mahon and that started him questioning his decisions. From there as a young kid with a lot of pressure (internal, external, or both) that's a tough spot. No amount of money can make you feel better when you feel like you're failing at your pursuit in life. I think having his brothers was something Josh needed and it just happened that none of his other coaches could quite figure him out, especially in the timeframe they were allotted. Rinaldi is a great coach and probably has that perfect mix of speed and strength for a pure 800 guy like Hoey. Again, I undersand the skepticism but since there's nothing concrete I think other aspects of the story are worth discussing.

Yeah I had to go back and re-read that part, because I was like "oh it must be a new coach" but then I confirmed it was the same one. It didn't really make sense.

The 800m is a fickle event. Some of those coaches had little success at coaching the 800m, or had one standout and lackluster teams over multiple decades.

A 1:47 high schooler had massive potential, and props for Hoey for not giving up. Look at the middle distance athletes for Akron and American University, or better yet talk to their athletes about the coaching (or lack thereof) they received there.

Maybe either extreme is bad?

Cade Flatt should make a phone calls. Only 3 years of postHS stagnation to deal with🤣