Again, the unsung American tracksters find their voice

The U.S. makes itself heard in all track and field areas in Paris.

Quincy Hall

For most of their lives they have run, jumped, thrown and danced like nobody was watching.  Usually, nobody was.

As the daily swirl of commercial sports filled up our cortexes on an everyday basis, the men and women of U.S. track and field were doing their thing on empty tracks, each day putting another brick in the foundation, knowing that everything in their lives would be defined by one day in August, 2024. 

Know how hard that is? Know how tricky it can be to synchronize your mind, your limbs, and your luck into a performance that will beat everyone in the world? There’s no round-robin, no loser’s bracket, no tiebreaker. It isn’t just win or go home. It’s win or disappear.

But at every Olympics they do it. They roar out of obscurity and dominate, even though their nation is more blissfully ignorant of track and field than any other in the developed world. And in Paris they branched out, reached deep into disciplines that have no American tradition, came away clutching medals. As of Thursday night they had 27, including nine golds. There is little money in what they do and even less fame. But as long as they’re standing on podiums, introducing themselves to countrymen who will forget their names by the dawn’s early light, they affirm the Olympian dream.

You know about what Noah Lyles did and didn’t do, and no doubt you were thrilled by Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone and enchanted by Gabby Thomas, and you might even know Ryan Crouser, who won his third consecutive Olympic shot put. (You might not know that Joe Kovacs, also of the USA, won his third consecutive silver.)

But Americans were finding medals in places they rarely even look.

— Valarie Allman won her second consecutive women’s discus gold. The last American to win the event was Stephanie Brown-Trafton in 2008. Only one other U.S. women has medaled, and only a couple have made it to the finals. To think that Allman, an accomplished dancer, only took up the sport because the weight throwers in her circle always had a spaghetti dinner for themselves, and she wanted some of that.

— Cole Hocker, a pianist, guitarist and mix artist with a man-bun, shocked 1,500-meter titans Jakob Ingebrigtsen and Josh Carr to finish first. Ingebrightsen and Carr are not friendly rivals, and as the Norwegian began fading he came inside to see if he could challenge Carr, opening up the “rail” for Hocker to set an Olympic record. Matt Centrowitz also won the 1,500, in 2016, but no other American has since 1908. Yared Nuguse of Notre Dame also came on late to finish third, which meant that two Americans would share the 1,500 podium for the first time since 1912.

— Lyles won a photo finish to take the unofficial title of World’s Fastest Human in the 100 meters. His best event has always been the 200, but he only got bronze, and later admitted he’d tested positive for Covid-19 two nights before.

— Grant Fisher, who was more of a soccer player than a runner as a youth, hung in there for the bronze medal in the 10,000 meters. Galen Rupp was the last previous American to medal, getting the bronze in 2012, but no American has won it since Billy Mills’ upset in 1964. 

— In 2021, Annette Echikonwoke was all set to represent her native Nigeria in the women’s hammer thrower. She was starring at the U. of Cincinnati at the time. But she was disqualified before she even got to Tokyo because she hadn’t taken the required drug tests. That, she said, would have been difficult, since the Nigerian federation hadn’t set up those tests or asked Echikonwoke about her locations. She chose to compete for the U.S. this time. Her silver is the first medal for an American woman in the hammer.

— Quincy Hall won the 400-meter U.S. Trials, but he wasn’t the headliner when the world toed the line. He had only given up the 400-meter hurdles two years earlier, tired of beating his head against the track. He had somehow gotten better at the College of the Sequoias, where he’d had to work two jobs to get by. “You can’t outrun a dog,” Hall said. “A dog will chase you forever.” And no one outran Hall in Paris, as he won in 43.40, fourth-best time ever.

— For that matter the Americans could claim Mondo Duplantis, who might have given Paris its most spectacular moment when, for the ninth time, he set a pole vault world record (20 feet, 6 inches). Duplantis only competes for Sweden because his mother Helena is from there, and because the Swedes astutely offered his dad Greg, a world-class pole vaulter in his day and a lawyer in Louisiana, a job on their coaching staff. Otherwise Duplantis is as American as beignets, having competed and won for LSU.

— But the man who belongs at the front of this unlikely parade was ranked 24th in the world in his event before he teed it up in Paris. The 3,000-meter steeplechase never appealed to Kenneth Rooks. How could it? What sort of masochist would run that hard and then push himself over a forbidding barrier and then a water jump on each lap? What sort of sadist designed such a thing?

Rooks only took up the race as a Brigham Young freshman, hopeful of making the team. He kept at it. He went on an LDS mission to Uganda. He came back to qualify for the 2023 U.S. World Championship team even though he fell halfway through the final of the trials. He got to the finals in Paris, but he was in last place halfway through. But as the hot pace seized the lungs of everyone else, Rooks kept plugging. He made a bold move to take the lead on the last lap, and even though he gave it up to Morocco’s Soufiane El Bakkali, the 2021 gold medalist, he still won silver and improved his personal best by nine gigantic seconds.

Since Horace Ashenfelter won steeplechase gold in 1952, this was only the third medal by an American. Kenya has 23 medals in the event, 14 more than any other nation.

Now, let’s acknowledge the obvious. The Russians are barred from the Olympics these days, which thins out the competition significantly. The Cubans, with a truncated roster, have only six medal winners so far (as of Thursday night). Sixteen years ago in Beijing they had 30.

Still, American coaches and athletes continue to work their lonely magic in the off-years, on the deserted mornings, in the thin mountain air, wherever they think they see an edge. And, every four years, they wind up holding the flag a little higher than anyone else in the delegation. It would be disrespectful not to salute.