wake up call for hocker and his awful tactics this almost makes me happy to see
Just looked like he couldn’t respond when they took off on Nuguse.. lead from the 3k in the legs? If you sit on who you perceive to be the best guy in the field, is that an “awful” tactic? I guess he should of predicted that 3 racers would blow past Nuguse w/ 2 to go..
Is this an upset? YES YES YES. 96.7% of the people picked Cole. 3.3% picked Yared. I'll have to ask Weldon is ANYONE picked anyone else.
Tired may have been part of it but I think it was mainly two things.
1) It's hard to win a 1500 when anything but a win is viewed as a disappointment. Ask El G and many others about this.
2) You simply can't win if you work hard in the first 3/4ths of the race to get PERFECT positioniong with 450m to go and then you toss it aside foolishly.
Cole is starting to be a little too much like Beamish for my liking. Dude, stop letting yourself get gapped. You don't want to need a miracle in every race coming off the penultimate turn. At least in outdoors there is still 300m to go. In indoors, it's only 150 and running wide punishes you more.
That's a little harsh. When has Beamish ever gone to the front to control the pace? He's a true sit and kick. Hocker ran safe on the outside for about 300m and then took control at the front for the next 600m, then Nuguse surged ahead and Hocker was second on the rail for another lap, and then the pack began to surge. He responded but in the end it wasn't enough. He's shown he can win all kinds of ways not just sit and kick. Today it didn't work out but he's still going in 3K. We ask alot of our champions to be perfect and always win.
Beamish is never in races, he had two big moments people remember in moderate fraction races.
Hocker is in every race , this one was poorly run and the residual from day before was evident.
I've watched the race now several times from the perspective of Cole and Yared. Both Cole and Yared went to the lead at times and prevented it from becoming super slow like the women's 1500. With Hocker he made a mistake and found himself boxed with 400 to go - he gets out with 350 to go - starts to move up to lead only to have Cawthra almost go down and in doing so causes Yared to have to break stride as well as Hocker. They both recover but by then Green/Houser and Ciattei are in full sprint with 250 to go. Some mistakes but I don't think either ran a terrible race. Indoor meets with the depth the US has in the 1500 are going to be messy.
