Josh Hoey profile by JG

I thought the use of the word "cycled" in the first sentence was funny.

This guy can afford anything... including the best doctors, the best drugs, the best way to pass doping tests.

Rinaldi is either the most gullible man on Earth or a great actor.

Amazing writeup. Probably one of my favorite pieces from JG. Awesome job.

The Hoey brothers are my favorite runners. Great family.

He feels like the ultimate trust fund kid - except he's fast enough to get paid, not living in a studio in Boulder.

To be fair you claim they work for their dad with no degree but if you read the article it clearly states all three of them finished college online.

Let us know how many people they have hired that have online degrees from liberty college.

yeah there isn’t much risk when your dad has generational wealth.

There are a couple of really solid coaches on the list. Was it just overtraining? Maybe. But then you see the work he is doing today, and wonder how he is handling it. Now it could be slightly different work (I.e can adapt to threshold a lot easier than say some really hard 300s) but it seems odd.

Yeah… that dad sounds like he’s a bittt much. Multiple high schools, 5-6 coaches. Pulled kids out of college, depressed son, millions of dollars spent. Bridges burned.

At the end of the day these kids could have gone to run at Oregon/ Washington/ nova etc and dominated.

All that money seems more like a burden than blessing.

Mr. Hoey hired a PR specialist to try and dampen the doping rumors by trying to get ahead of stories and explain away how his apparently world champion-level son required 6 coaches in like 7 years despite having more advantages than almost any other athlete I've ever seen. Sure, sure. How could my son dope? Can't you see he like shakespeare and was depressed? This family is psycho. Brothers with no hope of going pro dropping out of programs and skipping college for "love of the family" (read: pace set for Josh because they can't have non-family member athletes around to witness anything) is cult-like behavior. Just to go get online degrees from Liberty.

Rotating coaches and schmoozing them without giving really any of them more than a year to work with your world-class talent of a son is suspicious. What? you're telling me the rich guy working in finance who built his sons a track isn't above paying off coaches who felt uncomfortable? And the first coach to stick around and lead to immediate gold medal results also had another athlete recently involved in a doping issue? Or throwing money at Brojos and JG to publish a puff piece? Or demanding posts making accusations are deleted?

This entire thing has more red flags than just about anything in the sport right now. Complete house of cards. Wake me up when the positive A and B samples hit.

He sure came out nowhere to pull ahead of hoppel in the rankings

This story is objectively insane. That is my takeaway lol. No more than that.

Gault is a treasure. Keep on keepin' on.

“I’m not sure what [the critics] expected,” Hoey said. “This was an opportunity to become a professional and try to learn how to compete at the highest level early on. I’m not sure if someone else got that opportunity why they wouldn’t take it.”

I guess it depends on what's in the pro contract. For people without rich parents, it'd be tough to pass on a ~$250k free ride in college for a degree that would help them get in the door in the real world (as opposed to Daddy's firm). Is a degree necessary to become successful financially? Obviously not, but it's a much greater degree of difficulty.

i had a suspicion this guy was doping before this story. now im sure he is.

I’m not sure. But many things in part 1 of this story make doping a likelier reality in my mind. Deep multi-year depression and consistent failure can lead to desperation. A father who said himself he was spending a lot on his son’s success because of his own guilt to redeem his perceived failures—so where’s the line? The financial means to evade a doping control system as a poster mentioned above. And when you have infinite resources at your fingertips, it could also make one feel invincible and unafraid of consequences; if he’s caught doping and loses his running career, he knows he would certainly have a career in the company and future wealth. I hope it isn’t so, but suspicion is warranted.

What made the greatest impression on me is his brother's name being "Jaxson".

Great article. Thanks JG!

A little pedantic, but at the end of the first part, it mentions a 1988 Olympics 800m race being won in 2:04. None of the men’s or women’s heats, quarters, semis, or final were run that slowly, which seems like a bit of an easy detail to fact check? (Oh I’ve just read the second bit, it was the women’s heptathlon, I should never doubt JG, my apologies)