Kerr won today and is historically a much better tactician than Hocker, so he’s a bad example. Tactics are hard, especially indoors when there’s less room to maneuver, but Hocker’s “lead and fade” is terrible. There’s no reason for him to keep a medium pace at the front if he’s just going to abandon his position at the end. He either needs to defend the spot he worked for or do what Kerr does and bide his time.
What Jakob did in Eugene is nothing like Hocker cruising 58s or 59s for the first thousand and then defending his position, that’s a ridiculous comparison.
And now you want to cherry-pick the two races where Hocker’s strategy “worked” while conveniently ignoring all the examples where it’s failed lol. You realize he won those races in spite of his abysmal tactics, not because of them, right? He was .05 away from missing the 3k team, and your assessment is that putting himself in a horrific position and having to make up a ton of ground at the end worked well, even though the same maneuver is the reason he missed the 15 team and wasn’t racing Garcia and Nader today?
If Nader took your advice and lost, you’d be on here saying he should’ve sat on Garcia instead of trying to lead. There’s no reasoning with you when your sole purpose in criticizing Nader is to deflect from Hocker’s tactical deficiencies. Did Nader make some errors that potentially cost him? Yes. Was his race a disaster class that amounted to little more than throwing away a free gold medal? No. That was a tremendous performance by Garcia in spite of whatever mistakes the others might have made.
All of this is a deflection away from the point which is that Hocker’s tactics have been extremely poor as of late. That other people also make tactical errors is irrelevant. Hocker is an Olympic and World Champion with 3:27/7:23. He’s not going to win every time, but he shouldn’t be losing (sometimes badly) in very winnable scenarios. You don’t seem to understand that he’s held to a higher standard due to the strength of his credentials.