The Nozomi Tanaka Counter

Technically not professional but O-Sullivan and Wiley have run quite a few pro races this year. O'Sullivan ran at least 39 between January 14 and October 13 and Wiley ran 37 total races between January 20 and October 1. Her best two races of the year were #35 and #36.

I'm a huge Tanaka fan. If I could choose one athlete to give an Olympic medal to, it would be her, closely followed by Stewy McSweyn

so impressive that she's able to get in consistent training with that amount of travel as well.

Thanks for putting this together, Tanaka is awesome! The 5000 is clearly her strongest event but it’s really interesting to see her run the 800 so often. Speculation but It’s probably a great way to get in races without frying the legs and maybe it keeps her stride super efficient

She took a couple of weeks off of racing to do a mini training camp in Iten. This is all in Japanese, but you’ll get the gist if you’re interested.

She says racing 800m is important to keep her speed so that she can be competitive in 1500m.

By being competitive in 1500m, she obviously means against runners from other countries. She has no competition in Japan. Maybe that's another reason she likes racing 800m. That's the only distance she gets good competition from other Japanese runners.

Just look at this most recent 1000m race. (The race starts around the 1:00 mark.)

Her blowing the opposition apart in the U20 3000m final is one of my fave go-to videos.

+1

That was where I noticed her for the first time.

She's so hot!

I am just glad she is getting a bit of love in the English speaking world, because she has a lot of fans in Japan.

It is a shame "Japan Running News" does not talk up her achievements more, but she obviously did something to upset him.

Unfortunately it's always the same with Brett Larner and Japan Running News. He also works as an agent for some athletes and apparently he gets very angry with athletes who leave him after some time. This then results in him no longer mentioning such athletes on Japan Running News if possible. Or, when absolutely unavoidable, he attempts to describe even outstanding achievements as if they were nothing special at all, or makes snarky comments about those athletes.

That's what happened to Yuki Kawauchi, who used to be the most covered athletes on JRN by a large marging, but seems to be the biggest persona non grata there these days.

The same thing happened with Hitomi Niiya, about whom Brett also wrote a lot, but who then changed her agent to Leo Manzano at some point and has been very unpopular with him ever since, just like Kawauchi.

And that's what happened to Nozomi Tanaka as well. I don't know if Brett ever was Nozomi's official agent, but at least he supported her at a few races overseas in her early years and had quotes directly from her in his articles back then. Nowadays, Nozomi is managed by Brendan Reilly, and Brett does his absolute best to ignore her existence as much as possible.

Overall, this is all very sad because JRN obviously is the only international source on japanese running, but Brett Larner clearly is unable to leave personal things out of his reporting. If his behaviors were more widely known, some race directors would probably think twice about working with him and he also probably wouldn't be considered trustworthy enough to do the commentary of the Tokyo Marathon on Eurosport's international feed.

I agree with you. I am glad I am not the only one who has noticed. It really has gotten quite bad over the last two or three years. It became really noticeable during the Tokyo Olympics. Tanaka became the first Japanese woman to break 4 minutes for the 1500m at Tokyo and he just ignored that achievement.

Nowadays if he talks up anybody on his site I just assume he is their agent, which is probably not a good thing. But it makes sense, because why would he want to talk up somebody that is in competition with his clients.

This would not bother me quite so much if he just took the "News" out of his title.

Link?

Love that race. Basically ran 9:00 pace until 800m to go. Great lesson.

Her 5000m progression is legit -

15:35.72 as a 17-year old

15:15.80 as a 19-year old

15:00.01 at 20

14:59.93 at 22

14:58.60 at 23

14:29.18 at 24 years old.

Her 8:40.05 en route to 2 miles is an outright NR in 3000m.

Her previous best was 8:40.84 from 2021, and her previous indoor best was 8:45.64 from last year.