Matt Centrowitz's failure to advance is the most unsurprising "shocker" of the Olympics
With the defending champion weeded out, the men's 1,500-meter final will still be three and a half minutes of gloriously unprecedented tension
Standing on the track awaiting the second semifinal heat (video) of the 2021 Olympic men’s 1,500 meters on Thursday evening, 2016 gold medalist Matthew Centrowitz of the United States knew—as had everyone in both semis upon awakening that morning—that he would have to place among the top seven finishers in his race to advance to the final. With only two men from both heats advancing to the twelve-runner final on time, he had also just learned that he could afford to be sixth or seventh only in an unusually fast race; the small-q time from the first heat for Centro and others to beat was 3:34.81, worth around a 3:51.99 mile.
That first semifinal heat had gone out hard, with Timothy Cheruiyot, the 2019 World Championships gold medalist who ran 3:28.28 in Monaco on July 9, taking the field through the first lap in 56.1. (For reference, 56.0 per lap is exactly 3:30 for 1,500 meters.) The pace hadn’t lagged much after that.
For all Centro’s well-earned renown—as the race was about to begin, NBC analyst and former NOP member Kara Goucher cited former NOP member Centro’s oft-cited reputation as “a brilliant tactician”—his personal best in the event, 3:30.40, is six years old. His fastest time in the past three years heading into the Games was 3:32.81. Most tellingly in my eyes, Centrowitz had gone after Alan Webb’s 14-year-old American mile record of 3:46.91 on July 24 in an event set up solely for this purpose and basically flopped, running 3:49.26—a personal best, but worth only 3:32.28 [corrected from 3:32.78 in original mailing] at the Olympic distance.
The second semi went out at a modest but honest clip, 57.16 and 1:54.94. But crucially, Australia’s Stewart McSweyn, an uncommonly aggressive runner in various conditions, put in a move to force what was already not a real kicker’s race into an even quicker tempo, hammering lap three in 55.85 to hold a shrinking lead with 300 meters to go (2:50.79 1,200m split).
All this time, Centrowitz had been flitting around in sixth place or so, as is his wont. The problem is that the pace was simply not conducive to an implacable increase unless you were among the fittest men in the field and thus on the planet. And so, when it was time to make a Centro-like move, Centro was literally in no position to do it. He was more gassed than the athletes he had to close ground on, and they were simply outrunning him.
As I watched him finish ninth, I was struck most by the sheer gathering of talent I was watching from all over—Oceania, Scotland, Scandinavia, Africa, Luxembourg—rather than by Centro’s badly trailing the qualifying train. Kenya’s Abel Kipsang set an Olympic record, which rarely if ever happened in distance semis before superspikes, with a 3:31.65, while Centro had to settle for what was technically a 2021 best in 3:33.69 for ninth place. “This is gonna be an epic final,” Goucher said, and I think this is true, even scaled to the venue.
Should this outcome shock anyone? About a third of the men in the 48-man Olympic field came into the Games having run faster than Centro’s converted 3:32.28 this year or last. Had Matt Centrowitz not held an Olympic gold medal already—and sure, that’s a loud “if”—no wise, impartial observer would have rated his chances of making the final this summer, much less medaling, as being especially good.
Also, everyone in the world has had a long time to figure out how Matt Centrowitz runs. One way to prevent him from stealing a win in a slow-paced championship final is by running sufficiently fast in preliminary rounds to prevent his presence—and that of cagey bastards like him—in that final. I have no idea if this was anyone’s thinking going into the semis, or if things would have been different in a two-round rather than three-round format. Either way, guys who can run under 3:30 are clearly not in Tokyo this year with the idea of giving guys who cannot run under 3:32 any sort of a chance at a medal.
All of this wisdom is, I admit with a cheese-eating grin of shame, extraordinarily easy to produce after the fact of a Centro-less final has already been established. But if I had been asked to rate Centrowitz’s chances of making the Olympic team this year headed into the Trials, I’d have put them at no better than 75 percent. Once he got out of the prelims, I gave him at best a 50/50 shot of making the final, which meant that I wasn’t blown away or even moved by what happened in probably the last Olympic race of his life, just as I wouldn’t have been surprised to see him make it, but only with great effort. The evidence that Centro just isn’t among the best at his signature distance anymore has been there all spring.
For example: Some of the ugliness of that 3:49.26 could be washed away or wallpapered over by noting how hard Centro had gone out, around 54 for the first 440 yards. But when looking at the habits of an Olympic champion, saying “Well, he proved he’s fit if he messed up the pace and still held on” only carries so much real heft, especially after a “race” without the complications of a dozen other bodies around him or any pressure to win.
Also, Centro hasn’t been eager to actually race people in 2021. Instead, he’s been engaging in defensible-enough gimmickry, like running three 800-meter sections at a meet in early June within five or ten minutes of each other with the aim of averaging 1:49 or so. He has raced sparingly overall in recent years, even allowing for COVID-19, and that’s just never a sign in my experience that a top-level runner is either confident in his game or fully fit. Having great tactical sense only carries you so far when you’re up against a burgeoning world of freely doping Africans, Norwegian lifelong science experiments, and Poles who are not only as chemically charged as everyone else but keep wiping out in qualifying races thanks to their own flailing and getting inexplicably advanced to the next round.
Finally, five years is a long time in sports, even if you’re a professional golfer. Hell, four is practically an eternity in running, and we* forget this because we grow up accustomed to this being the basic Olympic norm (and consider how much other Western-world stuff is structured around four-year periods). You don’t just need to be unusually great to get to more than one Olympics, let alone medal in multiple Games; you also have to squeeze the timing of your own birth through a smaller opening than most people perhaps appreciate.
Oh. Since (I hope!) you’re waiting for me to make noise about the effects of the shoes on these numbers, well, the latest news on that: While no one knows just how much they speed things up owing to a dearth of data and wide inter-subject variability—some of the superspikes are custom-made—they’re not the only thing leading to incredible results like crazy-fast world records and Olympic records being set in distance semifinals. Alex Hutchinson is the one human being I trust more than anyone alive to both understand scientific data about running in context and communicate it not only sensibly but without bias, and his Sweat Science newsletter yesterday references an article in The Guardian suggesting that the track itself may be 1 to 2 percent faster than any previous surface. (That this claim is coming from the designer himself is probably significant.)
Regardless, Centrowitz has an Olympic gold medal that he won the only way he was ever going to win one, a feat for which he deserves enormous and enduring credit. At no time was he the fastest miler in the world, strictly speaking. Now, young athletes have emerged who can not only deploy Centro-like tactics on demand, but also run 3:28-3:29 when they have to. Sucks for him, but great for track fans, I guess.