Farewell to Jenny Simpson & Matthew Centrowitz, American Masters of The Tactical 1500m

The 2011 World Championships in Daegu, South Korea, marked the beginning of a new era of American 1500-meter running. On September 1, a 25-year-old converted steeplechaser named Jenny Simpson charged from 4th to 1st over the final 100 meters to win the women’s gold medal. Two days later, a 21-year-old college kid named Matthew Centrowitz pulled a similar come-from-behind feat in the men’s race, kicking hard for the bronze.

Both medals came as surprises. Simpson, coming off a stress fracture that had cost her much of the previous season, was in her first year as a full-time 1500 runner and had not even won that year’s US championship. Centrowitz did win USAs that year, and his defeat of 2007 world champion Bernard Lagat in that race suggested Centrowitz could medal at some point down the line. But few expected it to come so soon, particularly after Centrowitz finished 10th and 11th in his two Diamond League races before Worlds.

Over the next decade, the two became international fixtures. Both Simpson and Centrowitz made every World and Olympic team during the 2010s, combining for nine outdoor US 1500-meter titles (four by Simpson, five by Centrowitz) and eight global 1500 medals (four each, including Centrowitz’s World Indoor gold in 2016). If there is a Mount Rushmore of American milers, their faces are on it.

It is fitting, then, that Simpson, now 38, and Centrowitz, 35, are exiting the sport together. Simpson took her final steps as a professional runner at the New York City Marathon on November 3, four months after Centrowitz announced his retirement ahead of the US Olympic Trials. But in truth, the Simpson-Centro era came to an end three years ago at the 2021 US Olympic Trials, where Simpson missed her first team and Centrowitz made his last one. They were defeated by Elle St. Pierre and Cole Hocker, two runners who had grown up admiring them. Now St. Pierre and Hocker, both of whom claimed global titles in 2024, are at the vanguard of a new generation of American milers that has kept the medals coming.

Both Simpson and Centrowitz could be described as “master tacticians” on the track, but they were different people off of it. The subject of a fierce recruiting battle among the shoe brands coming out of the University of Colorado, Simpson was exactly what the winning bidder, New Balance, hoped she would be: the All-American girl, always calm, composed, and professional. Early on, Centrowitz gave off more of a playboy vibe — after Daegu, he said he hoped his bronze medal would “help me score some chicks” — but in truth, his biggest vices were candy, ice cream, and video games. As a professional with the Nike Oregon Project, he could be intense, a trait inherited from his father, Matt, a 1976 Olympian and former American record holder in the 5,000 meters. Centrowitz could also be proud — talk trash on social media at your own risk — and did not suffer fools. But he has always loved to talk, particularly about running, displaying a keen knowledge of the sport and its history. He would make a fine color analyst one day.

Though less than a decade has passed since their primes, the 1500 meters, as an event, is barely recognizable from the race Centrowitz and Simpson thrived in. Their personal bests, 3:57.22 and 3:30.40, would not have been fast enough to earn a medal at any of the last four global championships. Yet that should not dull their greatness. In some ways, it enhances it; Simpson and Centrowitz, at their core, were racers, plundering gold, silver, or bronze year after year, even when their pbs said otherwise. They were masters of a style of racing that has largely disappeared from the highest levels of the sport.

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Simpson’s Shock Win in Daegu and Knowing How to Ride the Edge

Normally when a runner wins one global title, that race stands out as the defining moment of their career. When you think of Centrowitz, you think of the 2016 Olympics. When you think of Donavan Brazier, you think of the 2019 Worlds. That’s not the case with Jenny Simpson in 2011. Her victory was historic — she was the first US woman since Joan Benoit Samuelson in 1984 to win a global distance title. But a couple of things about it were odd.

Start with the fact that Simpson was in the race at all. Though Simpson excelled in many events at the University of Colorado — she graduated with NCAA records in the 1500, mile, 3000m, 5000m, and steeplechase — she ran the steeple at the biggest meets, winning NCAAs three times and USAs twice. At the 2009 Worlds, she ran an American record of 9:12.50 and finished 5th (upgraded to 4th in 2015 due to a doping DQ). But that would prove to be the final steeple of Simpson’s career.

When Simpson turned pro at the end of that year, her college coach, Mark Wetmore, said he no longer wanted to coach her, so Simpson turned to Juli Benson. And she told Benson she wanted to run the 1500 — Simpson thought she had as good a chance, or better, to medal in that event than the steeple.

That decision took an extraordinary amount of self-belief. What world-class steepler gives up the event for the 1500 — a deeper and far more competitive event — and expects to be better? Simpson did.

There was some reason for optimism, though. Earlier in 2009, Simpson had run 3:59.90 at the Pre Classic to become just the fourth US woman under 4:00 for 1500m. And that gets to the second odd thing about her 2011 world title: it was far from the best year of her career. In 2011, Simpson’s season’s best of 4:03.54 ranked her just 22nd in the world. At the US championships in June, Morgan Uceny beat her by almost two full seconds. In Simpson’s last race before Worlds, she finished 11th in a 5,000 in Stockholm, and in her first two 1500s after Worlds, she finished 9th in Rieti and 12th in Brussels.

Fortunately for Simpson, the women’s 1500 was historically awful in 2011, which remains the only time in the last 47 years that no woman broke 4:00 all season. Uceny, the pre-meet favorite at Worlds, went down with 550m to run in the final after tripping over a young Kenyan named Hellen Obiri. Simpson’s closing splits (61.3 final 400, 30.9 final 200) were not particularly impressive for a race won in 4:05.40 (at the 2013 Worlds, Simpson would close in 59.2 and 29.2 for silver in a 4:02 race). Somebody had to win, though, and that was good enough for gold.

If there is such a thing as a fluky world title, Simpson’s in 2011 would qualify. But what she accomplished next was far from a fluke. Simpson finished 2nd, 11th, 3rd, and 2nd at the four global championships from 2013 to 2017, and that 11th deserves a sizable asterisk considering she lost a shoe with 650m to run. She accomplished this despite having to contend with a world record holder in Genzebe Dibaba, an emerging superstar in Sifan Hassan, and the greatest female miler ever, Faith Kipyegon.

Simpson’s finest hour may have come against a stacked field at the 2017 Worlds in London, one of the most dramatic races in the history of the event. As Hassan and Kipyegon battled for the lead on the back stretch of the bell lap, Simpson held back, allowing Laura Muir to pass her into third place. Her intuition told her that the leaders, who would split 28.2 from 1100m-1300m, were working too hard and at least one of them would die. She was right; Simpson, strong and powerful in the final 100m as always, would storm past Hassan and Muir while holding off Olympic 800m champion Caster Semenya for the silver.

Some athletes will tell you there is a difference between running for a medal and running for the win. Simpson, one of the most thoughtful and perceptive runners of her generation, never saw it that way. Once the racing got serious, the best move, for Simpson, was always the one that allowed her to get to the finish line in the fastest possible time. Her internal sense of pace became one of her greatest strengths.

“I just trust it,” Simpson said. “I trust that I know the edge.”

It is tempting to look at Simpson’s personal bests (2:00.45 for 800m, 3:57.22 for 1500m) and conclude she outperformed her ability in championships. That is a slight oversimplification. Her 800 pb was slow because she rarely raced the event seriously (she closed her final 800 of the 2016 Olympic final in 1:59.0). And that 3:57 was pre-super spikes — Simpson did win four Diamond Leagues during her career, including the 2014 series title. But there is no doubt Simpson was a big-meet performer. Not once did her 1500m season’s best place her in the top three in the world. Yet in the history of women’s 1500m running, only Faith Kipyegon has won more medals at global championships.

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Centrowitz’s Greatest Triumph: A Tactical Masterclass in Rio

Unlike Simpson in 2011, Matthew Centrowitz is very much defined by his 2016 Olympic 1500m victory. Which is quite a nice legacy to leave behind — he was the first American to win that race in over a century, ending a 108-year drought just two months before the Cubs did the same in the World Series. Initially, however, there was one aspect that irked Centrowitz: the time. It was 3:50.00, the slowest winning time at the Olympics since 1932 and slower than the T13 1500m at that year’s Paralympics.

In Rio, Centrowitz had not cared about the time. In the months following his Olympic victory, he found out that many others did. And whenever someone mentioned how slow the race had been, Centrowitz felt the need to defend himself, to educate them on how championship racing was different from a time trial.

“It was like I was trying to put out a fire,” Centrowitz said.

But Centrowitz’s perspective has shifted. Two more Olympic 1500m finals have come and gone since that night in Brazil, yet people still ask him about 2016 and why it was so slow. Every four years, Centrowitz realized, there will be a new Olympic champion. But there may never be another man who wins the Olympics in 3:50.

“I’ve grown to really enjoy and love that it actually panned out that way,” Centrowitz said on the LetsRun Track Talk podcast in July. “If that race was won in 3:34 or 3:36, it would have been another race, and on we go with the next Olympic cycle. But people keep coming back to this.”

Centrowitz had not planned on leading that race, but he had expected a slow start. The finalists had been held in a cramped call room for longer than usual, only allowed to do only one pre-race stride as they entered the track. Because of that, Centrowitz thought it unlikely that anyone would take it out hard. Centrowitz always got off the line well, which meant he found himself in the lead after 100 meters. Had someone tried to pass him early, Centrowitz would have let them by. But no one did.

Two moments from that night illustrate why Centrowitz was such a brilliant racer. The first came at 700 meters. Kenya’s Asbel Kiprop, the pre-race favorite, was running in last as the field approached two laps to go but threw in a surge on the outside. He came up on Centrowitz’s shoulder, even edging ahead briefly. But Centrowitz realized they had run too slowly for too long for him to surrender his position that easily. He made a subtle move to regain inside position and Kiprop shuffled back in the pack.

The second came a lap later, 450m to go. Djibouti’s Ayanleh Souleiman had surged into the lead off the turn but left a small gap open on the rail. Before the gap could grow any wider, Centrowitz used his right arm to (legally) squeeze himself past and retake the lead.

Throughout his career, Centrowitz retained a deep memory of his own races, internalizing specific scenarios should he encounter them again. When Centrowitz discussed his inside pass of Souleiman after the race, he immediately recalled a similar moment during the semis of the 2011 Worlds, where he had led a slow race early, lost the lead, and won after regaining it with an inside pass before the bell. Centrowitz was blessed with a fantastic kick (he ran his final 400 in Rio in 50.6), deceptive because his form barely changed, no matter the speed. But we should appreciate his racing brain, for few Americans have ever had a better one.

He retires with more global 1500m medals than any American man: World bronze and silver in 2011 and 2013, World Indoor and Olympic gold in 2016. And it’s worth noting that in both 2011 and 2013, one of the men who beat him was Kiprop, later banned four years for EPO.

Centrowitz drew scrutiny of his own for his association with the Oregon Project — he was coached from 2012-18 by Alberto Salazar, who was later banned four years for multiple breaches of anti-doping rules. But Salazar was never found to have doped any NOP athletes, and Centrowitz was adamant he never saw anything suspicious during his time with the group.

“Never once was [I] offered or seen anything, or else I would have gotten out of there a long time ago,” Centrowitz said in 2019.

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A New Era of 1500m Racing

The great unanswerable question about Simpson and Centrowitz is how they would have fared in the current era of racing. This is usually a question you ask of someone who retired decades ago, rather than months, but the 1500 has changed immensely in just a few years. And on the men’s side, that change is partly due to Centrowitz. Front-runners like Timothy Cheruiyot and aerobic beasts like Jakob Ingebrigtsen saw his win in Rio and realized their odds were better if they could force a pace fast enough to weed out the kickers. Each of the last four global championships have been won in under 3:30.

Centrowitz was always sensitive about the perception that he could not win a fast race, often noting that he set the US championship record of 3:34.09 in 2016 (a record Hocker broke this year). But it is undeniable that his record in paced races paled in comparison to his performance in championships. Centrowitz ran 25 Diamond League 1500/mile races in his career. In the majority of them (15/25), Centrowitz finished 8th or worse, and he finished higher than 6th just five times. He won only one, in London in 2018 — a race that did not count in the DL points race and was missing most of the key players who had raced in Monaco two days earlier. When Centrowitz ran his personal best of 3:30.40 in Monaco, in 2015, it ranked him just #12 in the world that year.

It is tempting, with that data in hand, to say Centrowitz would have been screwed in a fast championship race. But I suspect he would have done all right. Centrowitz lacked supershoes/spikes in his prime — that’s a second or two off his pb right there — and did not run a single DL 1500 in his greatest season, 2016. Had Centrowitz been faced with the prospect of needing to run sub-3:30 in finals, he would have done what Jake Wightman, Josh Kerr, and Cole Hocker all did in response to Ingebrigtsen and placed a greater emphasis on endurance training. Something tells me Centrowitz, who was 10th at the NCAA cross country championships in college and ran 13:00 for 5,000 at the tail end of his prime (this time with super spikes), would have found a way to adapt. You can make a similar argument for Simpson, whose greatest Diamond League season (2014), perhaps not coincidentally, came in a year in which she did not have to peak for a global championship.

At the same time, to argue that Centrowitz and Simpson would have achieved the same amount of glory in fast races would suggest that their skills — positioning, tactics, sense of pace — played no role in their championship performances. At the 2019 Worlds in Doha, when Timothy Cheruiyot and Sifan Hassan attacked with a fast pace from the front, both Centrowitz and Simpson finished well back in 8th place. Was that because the Americans had faded from their peak years, or did someone finally find the right strategy to use against them? We’ll never know with certainty. What we do know is that Centrowitz and Simpson rose to meet the challenges of their era in a way few Americans ever had.

And that may be the most important piece of their legacy. Before Simpson’s win in Daegu, it had been 28 years since an American distance woman had won World Championship gold on the track. The Olympic drought for US distance men had been even longer before Centrowitz’s win in Rio: 44 years. They were hardly alone in showing Americans could compete with the best in the world — Kara Goucher, Shalane Flanagan, Shannon Rowbury, Alan Webb, and even Bernard Lagat (though he was already world-class when he switched allegiance from Kenya) also helped push US distance running forward.

But Simpson and Centrowitz were the ones who climbed the highest; who showed, for the first time in decades, that you could come through the US system and stand atop a global podium. Those victories inspired a generation of American runners, including the ones who now follow in their footsteps representing the US on the highest stages.

“I remember the day that Jenny signed pro,” Cory McGee said after making the Olympic 1500 team in 2021. “I was in high school and my dad called me into his office and said this woman has just signed the first six-figure contract ever as a middle-distance runner. So not only did she take American middle distance running further than it’s ever been pushed just in regards to contracts and representation, but then just medaling. Standing in the family room in the home I grew up in and watching a woman from the United States medal on the world stage makes that possibility seems real…Once someone actually achieves those things, you start to think, maybe I can do that.”

Now it will fall to other runners to inspire the next generation. In that respect, American 1500m running is in great hands: between Hocker, St. Pierre, Yared Nuguse, Hobbs Kessler, and Nikki Hiltz, aspiring American milers have no shortage of role models. For Simpson and Centrowitz, the ride that began in Daegu, with stops in Moscow, Rio, and London, is now over. But what a ride it was.

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