Setting the Tone

Photo of Yared Nuguse by Ryan Sterner

Setting the Tone

The 117th Millrose Games

Words Jeff Merrill

The OAC has not lost a Wanamaker Mile since 2020.

Before 2020, the Boulder-based team didn’t exist. So you could say that the OAC has never lost a Wanamaker Mile, period. And you would be right.

Last year, and in 2023, Yared Nuguse ran a pair of 3:47s- the 2nd and 3rd fastest times ever run indoors.

In 2022, Olli Hoare defeated Josh Kerr to win in 3:50, and in 2021, the Millrose Games didn’t take place.

Every year, like it’s Groundhog Day, we remind people that the Millrose Games are the crown jewel of the indoor season in the United States and that the Wanamaker Mile is the crown jewel of Millrose Games.

This year, there is more uncertainty around who will be seeing their reflection in the hefty silver Wanamaker cup.

That sight is the banner carrier heading into outdoors. Nuguse was the favorite in races against any other Americans all the way up until he was beaten at the Olympic Trials.

In a world record performance last year, Josh Kerr won the Millrose 2-mile, defeating Grant Fisher and Cole Hocker. The year before that, he won the 3,000m. This year, Kerr is back in his bread and butter event to face off against the man who nearly pipped him at the line in the Olympic Games when they claimed silver and bronze. Nuguse.

Kerr has made his peace with coming up short of his goal last year, but the silver likely still tastes a bit like copper in his mouth and victory in Saturday’s race against a medalist will be an opportunity to cleanse the palate and set the tone.

The Scotsman hasn’t been quiet about his feelings about kickers. He isn’t afraid to take up the pace and push from as far as half a mile out.

Nuguse has a good close, but he’s not a quick gear-shifter and needs space to wind up. At speeds likely to exceed world record pace, getting to the front will be important.

When the engine is glowing cherry red and the bolts are rattling, who could pass at those speeds?

Maybe Hobbs Kessler could, with his 1:43 speed, or Robert Farken, still chafing after following a college kid to the line last week, even though that kid is the 3rd fastest indoor miler ever.

The OAC has never lost the Wanamaker, and Nuguse, is the 2nd fastest indoor miler ever, and like Patrick Mahomes and the Chiefs is going for the 3-peat, but if Josh Kerr isn’t looking at his own mug in the silver cup, there will be more talk about that than about whoever won.

And it will be a cold day in Gobbler’s Knob with 6 more weeks of chewing copper.

Watch for a World Record.

Kickers are an endangered species.

Picks Below

Men’s Wanamaker

🥇Josh Kerr

🥈Yared Nuguse

🥉 Hobbs Kessler

Women’s Wanamaker

🥇Nikki Hiltz

🥈Elise Cranny

🥉 Heather MacClean

Men’s 3,000m

🥇Grant Fisher

🥈Cole Hocker

🥉 Dylan Jacobs

Women’s 3,000m

🥇Jess Hull

🥈Melissa Courtney-Bryant

🥉 Tsigie Gebreselama

117th Millrose Games Live on NBC & Peacock

Saturday, Feb 8th

4-6pm ET

Photo by Ryan Sterner

Soul over polish: Millrose Games piece from 2023

Rippin’ It at the Terrier

During last week’s write-up mostly about the indoor track at Boston University, we promised that we would revisit the American top 100 All-time list for short track and see how they’ve changed. There are a couple ways of doing this, and the World Athletics rankings lists allow you to toggle between both. One way (in which we looked at them last week) is to see the marks as ‘Best by Athlete’ in which there is only each athlete’s best mark in the event. The other way is to look at the top performances of all-time, in which an athlete can be in the rankings as many times as they’ve run a time to get them there. For example, Yared Nuguse is the second fastest short track miler of all time, having run 3:47.38. On the top performances of all time, he occupies positions 2 and 3, as he’s run 3:47.38 and 3:47.83 in back-to-back wins at the Millrose Games.

Ok, so we’ll take a look at both lists and see how they changed over the weekend, setting aside  Ethan Strand causing us to question whether there are five fingers on the hand in front of our face currently, and whether we’re made up of cells or atoms? And if atoms are buzzing around to create the everyday objects we interact with but not completely touching each other in the wall in front of us, is it possible to punch it so fast that we don’t touch any of the OWWWW!!!

The kid ran 3:48. How much faster are we going to get? In the words of the singularly great coach of Karsten Warholm, Leif Olav Alnes:

“There’s a long way between 45.9 and 0.0”

Back to Americans in Boston. There was actually not as much change to each list as I expected. The biggest shift was in the Women’s 5,000m all-time marks list, which shifted the previous 100th best mark of 15:30.17 to 108th best with the 100th best now being Jenn Rhines’ 15:27.82 set in 2009. It should be noted that these times are only short track (200m ovals). The 300m indoor track times achieved at UW do not count toward these rankings.

100th Best Mark By American Athlete All-time before and after last weekend…

Women’s Mile: 4:31.73 ▶️4:31.51

Women’s 3,000m: 8:56.17 ▶️8:55.49

Women’s 5,000m: 15:39.75 ▶️15:39.25

Men’s Mile: 3:56.06 ▶️3:55.92

Men’s 3,000m: 7:47.74 ▶️7:47.29

Men’s 5,000m: 13:34.06 ▶️13:33.88

100th Mark by American Athlete All-time (all performances) before and after last weekend…

Women’s Mile: 4:28.86 ▶️4:28.71

Women’s 3,000m: 8:51.06 ▶️8:50.38

Women’s 5000m: 15:30.17 ▶️15:27.82

Men’s Mile: 3:54.66 ▶️3:54.54

Men’s 3,000m: 7:43.98 ▶️7:43.76

Men’s 5,000m: 13:24.98 ▶️13:23.30

Maybe these are significant drops to occur in a single weekend, and maybe it is remarkable that every single mark in the 3 distances dropped within a 3-day stretch, but nothing really seems extraordinary about the changes here. Americans are getting faster, and we can see it in a tiny snapshot. To open the aperture and see the effect that the BU track (among other advancements) has had on American times, let’s look at the shift from 2013, when Rupp embarked on his record-breaking onslaught at BU to now, and also, for context, let’s include the previous 12 years all the way back to January 1, 2001.

100th Mark by American Athlete All-time (all performances)

2001          2013         2025            Time Drop

Women’s Mile:          4:35.65 ▶️ 4:33.42 ▶️4:28.71          2.23 secs vs. 4.71 secs (.08% vs. 1.75%)

Women’s 3,000m:    9:04.81  ▶️ 9:00.73 ▶️8:50.38         4.08 secs vs. 10.35 secs ( .75% vs. 2%)

Women’s 5,000m:   16:19.65 ▶️15:58.92 ▶️15:24.32      20.73 secs vs. 34.60 secs (2.2%  vs. 3.7%)

Men’s Mile:               3:58.4h  ▶️ 3:57.45  ▶️ 3:54.54       1 sec vs. 2.91 secs (.42% vs. 1.2%)

Men’s 3,000m:          7:52.00  ▶️  7:50.11 ▶️7:43.76        1.89 secs vs. 6.35 secs (.40% vs. 1.3%)

Men’s 5,000m:         14:00.00 ▶️13:46.57 ▶️13:21.17      13.43 secs vs. 25.40 secs  (1.6% vs. 3.1%)

*Women’s 5,000m marks are 83 on All-time list and Men’s 5,000m marks are 79th on All-time lists for given dates as World Athletics does not keep rankings past 16:20 for women and 14:00 for men.

The marks at every distance are getting exponentially faster, even though it would seem that the closer we get to 0, the smaller the incremental drops. Better double knot ‘em, we’re not slowing down. We’re actually getting faster, faster.  Those 5,000m time drops are especially significant.

Although the American lists did not change as much as we thought they would over the weekend, we noticed something else that was made clear to us through a tweet by agent Dan Lilot:

And then by the reshaping of the World All-time performance list simply by marks from BU.

The Men’s 5,000m list was rewritten to the tune of the number 21, 23, 40, 48, 67, 85, and 92 marks being set on the BU track. All set by foreign athletes.

The NCAA might be the biggest sponsor of track and field in the world, and the biggest funder of Olympic sports. Not only do colleges provide scholarships, training, salary for coaches, nutrition, travel, and exceptional training facilities to the athletes who compete for their school colors, the exceptional facilities are also the best competition venues in the United States and some of the best in the world for strictly performance. There are reasons more fixed plywood board tracks aren’t built. One reason is maintenance, and the other is that the only places that can dedicate a year-round facility to track and field and cover the financials, are colleges.

Because of this, and the ability to fix heats to set up perfectly paced races and go after time standards, the professionals of the track world race at the collegiate level. Couple this with the ever-lowering time standards and little prize money in the Continental Tour races to lure pros away from college racing (despite the extra points received for competing in them), and even pros from other countries are seeing the benefit to racing at college meets in the US. They’re basing themselves in the US to train or flying over from other parts of the world to run at US colleges, during college meets, wearing their professionally-sponsored uniforms. This is likely not what World Athletics intended, as Lilot points out.

Which brings me to my final point on this subject, (at least for this write-up) and it is a point that many of you will not want to hear. As the biggest revenue driver in Division 1 athletics, college football is the biggest benefactor of Olympic sports in the world.

Let’s hope the 12 team play-off pans out and doesn’t ruin the build-up for LA 2028.

Enjoy the Millrose Games / Super Bowl combo weekend!