One of the most amazing events of the Paris Olympics was the men’s 1500m field competition, where American Cole Hocker won the gold and his teammate Yared Nuguse took the bronze.

To me, a race—whether in water, on ice, on a bicycle, or on solid ground—is always the center of competition because, like both life and fiction, it has a beginning, a middle, and an end. And the 1500m is the best distance to give you a perspective on all three parts without being too long for a bit of sprinting in the last 100 meters. This is the metric equivalent of the mile (15/16ths of it), and there’s a reason that breaking the four-minute mile has always been a cultural benchmark.

The August 6 race had been preceded by a lot of media bravado from the Olympic champion, Norway’s Jakob Ingebrigtsen, which was met by bravado from the world champion, Josh Kerr of Great Britain. I knew absolutely nothing of this feud until the gun went off and I began rooting for the three Americans.

What made this race intense was Ingebrigtsen setting a fast pace right at the start, and the other runners had to keep up and stay in there tight. It also made it difficult to break out and pass. This was quite different from the women’s race, where the world record holder, Kenyan Faith Kipyegon, was way, way out in front for half the race, running to beat her own world record, which she did with a time of 3:49:04.

Multiple stories unfolded in this race. One was Ingebrigtsen the tall, white-shirted Nordic god hogging the limelight until the very end. Another was his foil in dark navy, the equally tall Kerr with his beard and funky shades, plotting to overtake the Nordic god in the last 50 seconds. Two long-legged Kenyans—Timothy Cheruiyot and Brian Komen—remained in the frontrunner group for most of the race.

The other story was the three Americans—Nuguse, Hocker, and Hobbs Kessler—who positioned and paced themselves just behind the first three runners. All three stayed up as the Kenyans dropped back. And as Ingebrigtsen and Kerr ran against each other, Nuguse and Hocker made their move together. As Kerr took the lead, the two Americans took him on either side for a stunning finish. Ingebrigtsen fell back to finish fourth, just ahead of Kessler.

The final story was Hocker, who had his pace broken by Ingebrigtsen at the final turn and had a hard time getting the space to pull ahead. You really have to watch him hijack that race at the very end. He’s relatively small, and with his blond ponytail he looks more like a worker at a food co-op than an Olympian. His being from Indiana made me think of the movie Breaking Away and the meme of the American underdog.

I’m the first one to decry the fatuity of thinking that anything’s possible if only you try, give it your best shot, stay in the race until the very end. Even though we make this a cornerstone of primary education, we have doubts. That old can-do spirit has come under fire with data showing the myth of meritocracy, where it’s not a college education that gets you ahead but your family connections. It’s when we realize that the race is unfair that we stop pushing hard. And behavioral economics has shown the dangers of loss aversion, whereby people perceive real or potential loss as more severe than an equivalent gain. More and more we live our lives by data and analytics, meaning that we only try for things with good odds that we’ll win.

But of course if we all did that there would be no Olympics and no Americans swooping in at the home stretch to make it an entirely different race. And that is my new metaphor for the 2024 Presidential race. However much the quants and the pundits and the podcast bros and the has-been politicos with built-in light rings zooming into CNN and MSNBC every night try to tell us what’s going to happen, this is a live and dynamic race.

It looks like the Harris-Walz campaign might pull it off, channeling the mystical suspension of disbelief that NBC’s Leigh Diffey called in the last seconds: “All the talking is over! Cole Hocker wins gold!” §