How Josh Hoey Went from Also-Ran to World Indoor Champion, Part II: Going All-In With Justin Rinaldi & The Fast 8 Track Club

This is part II of our story on Josh Hoey’s rise from struggling pro to World Indoor champion that was behind our SC paywall for the last month. Click here to read part I: How Josh Hoey Went from Also-Ran to World Indoor Champion, Part I: A Coaching Odyssey.

For as long as he has been running, Justin Rinaldi has been obsessed with the 800 meters. As a teenager, he remembers riding a tram through Melbourne with his girlfriend when he caught sight of an electronics store that had a wall of TVs showing an 800-meter race at the 1988 Olympics. He hopped off the tram: he just had to watch. The winning time of the race was only 2:04.

“I go, ‘I ran 1:56 my first 800 in joggers. I can make the Olympics easily’,” Rinaldi said. “I was just obsessed. Years later, I realized, actually, I was watching the women’s heptathlon. Because if I was watching the women’s 800, they ran 1:56, the two East Germans. If I had watched that race, I would have gone, Shit, I’m slower than the girls.“

Though he never made it to the Olympics, Rinaldi put together a solid career, winning the Australian title in 1997. He ran his personal best of 1:47.62 at the 1995 Prefontaine Classic — coincidentally finishing one spot behind Brad Sumner in that race.

An affable Aussie, Rinaldi had not planned on getting into coaching, taking a job at ANZ Bank in Melbourne as his career was winding down. But in 2008, a decathlete friend came to Rinaldi with a request. He had been working with a 15-year-old who had shown some promise, but the kid needed a proper 800m coach. Would Rinaldi be interested in the coaching him after work?

Rinaldi resisted at first, but the kid wore him down. Rinaldi agreed to coach him for six months, which turned into 10 years. Under Rinaldi’s tutelage, the kid, whose name was Alex Rowe, went on to run a personal best of 1:44.40 in 2014, tying Ralph Doubell‘s legendary 46-year-old Australian record.

What began as a one-athlete relationship eventually grew into the Fast 8 Track Club, where Rinaldi has coached the likes of Joseph Deng (who broke Rowe and Doubell’s record in 2018) and Peter Bol, who finished 4th at the 2021 Olympics. All while working full-time for ANZ and receiving no support from the shoe companies.

“[2024] was actually the first year I made any money out of my coaching,” Rinaldi said. “From 2008-[23], I was basically coaching for free.”

When Rinaldi began coaching Josh Hoey remotely in 2023, he started by asking Hoey about his goals. Hoey said that after years of being stuck at 1:47, he just wanted to run 1:46.

Rinaldi and Hoey at the warmup track for World Indoors in Nanjing (Courtesy Justin Rinaldi)

“I said it’s probably not worth my effort if you only want to run 1:46, because I think you’ve got a lot of talent,” Rinaldi said. “I think I unleashed the beast, because then he said, I want to run 1:43, I want to make the Olympics. [I said], that’s what I want to hear from you. I think he’d been a bit scarred from what had happened the past five years.”

Hoey has a unique running form. Long stride, long back-kick. His arms flail wide, away from his body, and rather than pumping them straight up and down, Hoey will rotate them in a circular motion, as if cracking an imaginary whip. But Rinaldi wasn’t worried about that when he saw Hoey in person for the first time at a training camp in Albuquerque in the spring of 2024. Rinaldi actually liked the way he moved. It felt fast.

“I think you always have one funny arm action,” Rinaldi said. “I don’t think I can ever get that looking really smooth. But I don’t want to spend too much time on that because I don’t think it’s impacting it as much as everyone else thinks it is. If you look at him from the waist down, he’s actually moving really well. The way he lands on the ground, he’s not spreading his foot or anything like that.”

After their first workout in Albuquerque, Rinaldi was sold on Hoey’s potential. He turned to Fran Hoey with a question: How hasn’t he run 1:44 yet?

“I said, if I can’t get this guy to run 1:44, there’s something wrong with me,” Rinaldi said.

Hoey had already made progress that winter, running 1:47.04 (his first pb in four years) and finishing 3rd at USA Indoors. But the real sign something had changed came in Hoey’s outdoor opener at the Florida Relays, where he skipped the 1:46’s entirely and ran a huge pb of 1:45.54. He would improve to 1:44.12 and 4th at the Olympic Trials and would end the year at 1:43.80 after running a post-Trials pb at a meet in Kotrijk, Belgium, in July.

How did they crack the code in 2024, when so many previous attempts had failed?

The Breakthrough

Josh Hoey points to a few reasons for his breakthrough last year. The biggest, he says, is Rinaldi. Hoey likes how Rinaldi approaches the 800 from all angles, working on speed development while keeping enough endurance work in the program to stay strong. Perhaps most importantly, Rinaldi is willing to work with Hoey’s quirks.

One of Hoey’s final races before the Olympic Trials last year came at the Edwin Moses Legends Meet in Atlanta on May 31. It did not go well: Hoey ran most of the way in lane 2 and finished 8th in 1:47.72. In the aftermath, he began to panic. The Trials — potentially, his last Trials — were just 27 days away. Sumner was injured and had stopped working with Rinaldi, and Bol was mulling retirement. Rinaldi said the Fast 8 Track Club would have continued regardless, but to Hoey, it felt as if the team’s existence was riding on his Olympic Trials performance.

So he did what he always tried to do: train his way out of the problem. In the leadup to the Trials, he added extra reps to workouts, subbed in threshold sessions instead of easy runs. And kept it a secret from Rinaldi.

“My whole mentality going into the Trials was, I’m just going down swinging,” Hoey said.

Eventually, Hoey told Rinaldi what he had been doing. Rinaldi wasn’t mad; in fact, he liked some of Hoey’s ideas. And he loved that Hoey was willing to work so hard. He just wanted to be kept in the loop.

“I felt like with Peter and with Joseph Deng, I had to drag them to training, like come on, do this,” Rinaldi said. “Whereas Josh, I have to pull him back a little bit…I think that’s where I work well with him, because I think previous coaches may have got pissed off or annoyed about doing something that the coach wasn’t aware of.”

Now, if Hoey has an idea for a workout or wants to add a rep or shorten the rest during a session, he runs it by Rinaldi — sometimes even having Fran call him during a session (despite the time change to Australia, Rinaldi usually picks up).

“Justin is very, very flexible in allowing Josh to do that without allowing his ego [to get] in the way,” Jonah Hoey said. “He’s been very accommodating when we need to change the workouts.”

Giving Hoey a voice in workouts is one way Rinaldi has been able to rein in his overtraining impulse. The other is by making generous use of the treadmill for threshold sessions. Hoey was on the treadmill a lot early in their relationship. At this point, Hoey said, he trusts himself enough to run the correct pace outdoors as well. But Rinaldi still estimates Hoey is on the treadmill around four times a week. Hoey’s former coach Tommy Nohilly believes that is a big reason for Hoey’s recent success.

“How Justin arranges things, they found a good methodology,” said Nohilly, who coached Hoey in the fall of 2022. “The biggest thing is, even if Justin’s not there, if he sets a workout and it’s on the treadmill, the paces are set. Unless you increase the pace on the treadmill, you’re not going to run fast. There’s just a lot more control on what he was doing and a lot more precision.”

Dad Almost Called It A Season Before The Olympic Trials Last Year

Josh’s impulses weren’t the only ones Rinaldi needed to tame. Immediately after the poor race in Atlanta, Fran approached Rinaldi for what Rinaldi described as a “robust” conversation. With Josh watching on, Fran told Rinaldi he felt the race was proof that Josh was not fit enough to contend; he wanted to shut the season down. Rinaldi thought Josh had just made a tactical mistake, and that they should wait to talk until the next day, when they had some distance from the race.

“I said, well is [shutting the season down] what you would have done in the past?” Rinaldi said. “And he goes, yeah. And I said, aren’t we doing things different than we’ve done in the past, and we want different results? And he said, yeah. I said, well we’re not shutting the season down, don’t worry about it. People can have a bad race…Sometimes you just have to move on from it.”

Since then, Rinaldi said, he has had no issues with Fran.

“I worked in the corporate world for 25 years,” Rinaldi said. “So I’ve had people talk to me like Fran talks for 25 years. And I don’t get offended by it, because it is a job. And he doesn’t mean anything bad by it. Fran likes results. And so do I. And he talks very directly. Some people get put off by that. And I think that’s all right.”

Rinaldi believes he met Josh at the right time in his career. Had he begun coaching him three years earlier, when Josh was 21 instead of 24, Rinaldi may have found it harder to control him. Hoey also believes that is why he was able to improve so rapidly in 2024. Even though his races from 2019-23 were largely poor, he still had five years of workouts under his belt.

“I have not really had a major injury,” Hoey said. “…I tell people all the time I never exactly gave up because I never stopped training. And I think that’s why I think I was able to improve in the right situation, really quickly.”

Too Good To Be True?

Josh Hoey has heard the speculation that no one could make as big a jump as he has at age 24 — from 1:47.04 to 1:43.26 and world champ in the span of one year — without the use of performance-enhancing drugs. He says that those who believe that are jumping to conclusions without knowing his full story.

“I just don’t think they don’t know as much about track as we do or our situation,” Hoey said. “There has been a lot more that goes into this than people understand.”

Fran believes the skeptics are missing out on enjoying one of the sport’s great comebacks.

Kevin Morris photo

“The story of no-name kid coming back and just keep fighting, keep fighting, keep fighting, is a story that a lot of people should buy into,” Fran said. “He just never gave up on himself. And that’s pretty rare.”

I ask Rinaldi whether being so far removed from Hoey, physically, for much of the year makes him hesitate when it comes to Hoey’s progression.

“No,” Rinaldi said. “Because I can’t win. The Pete Bol situation (Bol was provisionally suspended in January 2023 after his A sample tested positive for EPO, only for Sport Integrity Australia to clear him six months later after an investigation), I saw Pete every day, I know what Pete’s like. I know that the physios are trying to get him to take an anti-inflam for his sore groin and he refuses to take that. And I still got [people] saying, Well how do you know? You can’t know 100%. So I just can trust people on what I see. And I just don’t see Josh doing that.”

There’s only one part of Rinaldi and Hoey’s relationship that poses a bit of a problem: the distance. By communicating with Fran, who sends him videos of each session, Rinaldi makes it work for training. Races are different. If Hoey is racing in the middle of the night, Rinaldi will sleep in the spare room of his house, so as not to wake his wife and children, and set an alarm for one hour before a race, just in case there is a last-minute question. There usually isn’t.

“It’s a pretty boring hour,” Rinaldi said.

When Rinaldi does not have a way of watching the race live, he’ll go to the timing site and watch the splits pop up on his iPad in real time. He’ll pretend he’s actually there, sometimes yelling “Come on Josh!” or “Pick it up!” at the screen. Rinaldi recalled watching the Olympic Trials final, where he could see Hoey in 4th with 100m to go but had to endure an agonizing wait only to learn Hoey had missed the team by one place.

“That last 13 seconds took forever,” Rinaldi said.

USA Indoors was the opposite. Hoey led wire-to-wire, and though Brandon Miller was still close with 100m to run, Rinaldi felt confident Hoey would separate in the home straight. When Hoey’s result popped up as 1:43.24 — an American record and the second-fastest time ever indoors — Rinaldi, sitting on the edge of his bed at 5 a.m., reacted as you would expect.

“I was like, Holy fuck, that’s amazing!“

Pushing on into 2025: “If I want to coach an Olympic champion and a world record holder, I’ve got to be all-in”

Neither Hoey nor Rinaldi was content to rest on their laurels after Hoey’s breakout season. Rinaldi left his job at ANZ at the end of 2024 to coach the Fast 8 Track Club full-time.

“I just figured if I’m coaching an athlete that’s all-in, I need to be the same,” Rinaldi said. “If I want to coach an Olympic champion and a world record holder, I’ve got to be all-in.”

The early results are strong: Hoey won the world indoor title, Bol set a national record of 1:43.79 at the Australian championships, and new addition Mark English earned the bronze medal at European Indoors. Between severance pay from ANZ and stipends from athletes like the Hoeys, Bol, English, and the Netherlands’ Tony van Diepen, the Melbourne-based Rinaldi has enough for now to support his wife and two young children. But his goal is to become head coach of a sponsored 800-specific group.

Keeping his event focus so narrow might make it more challenging to attract a sponsor, but no other event excites Rinaldi in the same way as the 800. And he believes he can fill a void in the US right now.

“I coached a kid who ran 8:23 for the steeple, and I’ve never coached steeple before,” Rinaldi said. “And I moved him from the 800 to the steeple, but I didn’t enjoy it. I don’t go watch steeple races. My passion is [the 800]. I can tell you how every person in those [World Indoor] heats [was] going to run. I can tell you exactly what they’re going to do because I’ve watched them run. I’ll watch every race 10 times. 

“…I’ve posted on LetsRun before, probably three years ago, that I believe that the US is underperforming in the 800. You should have five guys running 1:42. And I think in the leadup to the 2028 Olympics, we need an 800m group in the US to have three people in the final and win medals.”

He may already be coaching one of them. After running his 1:43.80 last July in Kotrijk, Hoey became frustrated. He was finally, finally running fast, but the pro circuit was about to go on pause for the Olympics. And none of the Diamond Leagues were interested in the fourth-placer from the US Olympic Trials. If he was going to get into the best races in 2025, he knew he had to do something big during the indoor season.

So rather than take a break after the Fifth Avenue Mile on September 8 — the traditional season-ending race for most pros — Hoey kept his foot to the gas. Fifth Ave was on Sunday. Hoey ran a threshold session on Tuesday. His “break” consisted of three days of driving from Philadelphia to Flagstaff with Jonah and his dog, an Akita named Hime. The next Tuesday, he ran his first workout at altitude. On December 7, Hoey ran his first race of the new season, a 3:52 mile pb in Boston.

“I think some athletes get mentally tired by racing, and some people just love racing,” Rinaldi said. “And Josh loves racing. And so if you’re not mentally tired, why pull back?…To me, there was a little bit of risk, but the benefits outweigh the risks.

“It’s easy when you’re at Bryce Hoppel’s level when you’re getting into races. When you’re the level below, you need to do something to get up into that spot. And the only way Josh is going to do that is to run World Indoors.”

Moving to Flagstaff had also been a risk — aside from that disastrous stint in Mammoth in 2018, Hoey had never trained at altitude before.  But Hoey felt he had to add something if he was to close the gap to the world’s best. He saw the gains Hoppel had made after doing training at altitude the previous fall, dropping his pb from 1:43 to 1:41, and felt that training at 7,000 feet and bumping his volume in workouts could provide a similar boost. Josh plans to be based there for most of the 2025 season, and the family now owns a house out there and has temporarily relocated, with Fran taking splits and filming videos during workouts and Leslee pricking their fingers during lactate sessions.

Brotherly Love

As usual, Josh’s brothers have followed him out west.

27-year-old Jaxson, who has lowered his pbs from 1:47.94 to 1:46.86 (800) and 4:01.63 to 3:55.92 (mile) under Rinaldi, is hoping to emulate Josh with a breakthrough of his own.

Josh wearing his Once More Track Club shirt in his hotel room in Nanjing (Photo courtesy Justin Rinaldi)

Jonah, 23, is just happy to be part of his older brothers’ journey. Jonah and Josh were born on the same day, November 1, two years apart, and on their most recent birthday, Jonah surprised Josh with a custom t-shirt for the “Once More Track Club,” handing them out to other friends and family. The track club never really took off — they’re part of Fast 8 now — but it was a reminder of how far they had come from Josh being forced to pick up the phone and call Rinaldi one year earlier. And that no matter where he goes, his brothers will be there to follow him unto the breach.

“I’ve always wanted to run for Josh and for my family. Personal success has never been a huge priority for me,” said Jonah, who improved a great deal himself this winter, lowering his personal best from 1:48.63 to 1:47.05.

Right now, it’s all working for Josh Hoey. He clicks with Rinaldi in a way he never did with his previous coaches. Altitude training has made him stronger than ever, without sapping his speed. For years, Hoey wanted to run with confidence, and so far in 2025, he has. But it is how Hoey responds to the inevitable setback that will truly show if his attitude has changed. Will he stick it out, or pack his bags again?

“I have a lot more confidence in myself and the training but I see the outdoor season as having as many challenges and difficulties and hiccups to manage as ever,” Hoey said.

Hoey has already made it through his share of challenges. He kept going through five years in the professional running wilderness. He kept going after Atlanta last year. Even World Indoors was a struggle. After dominating the first two rounds, Hoey didn’t feel great on the day of the final, a very long season finally catching up to him.

“I was joking with my dad about a common soccer meme where it’s like, Messi can score four goals against Real Madrid at Camp Nou, but can he do it on a cold rainy Wednesday night in Stoke?” Hoey said. “That’s kind of how it felt going into the World final.”

Josh Hoey got it done in Nanjing. The world waits to see what he will do next.

This is part II of our story on Josh Hoey’s rise from struggling pro to World Indoor champion. Click here to read part I: How Josh Hoey Went from Also-Ran to World Indoor Champion, Part I: A Coaching Odyssey.