BRINGING IT BIG with a striking breakthrough in an Olympic year: it’s any athlete’s dream scenario, usually constructed through years of sweat and toil and often ignited by heeding the heart and gut. Bryce Hoppel can tell you as much after a ’24 season in which he claimed American Recordholder status in the 800 in an Olympic final comparable in the modern era only to the epic 2-lap medal race of London 2012.
Midland, Texas, native Hoppel finished 0.17 back from the bronze as he leaned for the line in Paris, yet medals never bespeak the entire breadth of achievement in an Olympic final.
At 27 Hoppel axed 1.10 from his PR on the highest stage and with his time would have won every previous 2-lap final in the 128-year history of the Games save one — that London ’12 race captured by David Rudisha with the still-standing World Record. The Kansas alum’s 1:41.67 clocking would have been sufficient for silver in every previous Olympic final.
The result shocked Hoppel though on some level it did not, as he explained to T&FN in this in-person interview, conducted just before the holiday season.
Hoppel’s nailed-it 2024 campaign, springboarding from the top of the World Indoor podium in March to his finest running summer yet, successfully welded a fruitful 8-year partnership with KU assistant Michael Whittlesey to synergy from training at altitude with a new group of training partners, including 800/1500 Olympian Hobbs Kessler. Read on. (Continued below)
T&FN: I imagine there’s no shortage of thoughts you have about your Olympic year. In so many respects you at last played out what you’ve certainly been working toward since at least 2019.
Hoppel: That’s what makes it special. There were so many moving parts that came together, finally. It was an incredible season that I’ll probably look back fondly on for my whole career. For sure.
T&FN: Winning the world indoor title, that must have been a key moment for what happened later. But did you do some things differently this year? I know you’ve been training with Hobbs Kessler. I just spoke with Hobbs and he says that he runs about 90 miles a week and you run what?
Hoppel: Probably 50.
T&FN: So you’re not training together all the time, but you’re doing, it sounds like, a lot of the key workouts together — at altitude in Flagstaff with the day-to-day eye of your longtime coach 1000 miles away in Kansas. How has that coaching relationship evolved?
Hoppel: KU has always done incredible things for me that made me into athlete that I am. And I am still being coached by Michael Whittlesey who’s at the University of Kansas. And I think it was more so my personal life that I was maybe a little unhappy in and not as motivated to be doing my best on the track side of things. And so I think I was a little bit ready to move on away from Lawrence and kind of see what there was in the professional track world — ’cause I kind of was still in that collegiate system to where, you know, I was [somewhat] unhappy and probably wasn’t reaching my full potential.
And this is one of the exciting leaps that I kind of took. It honestly didn’t even start out as a plan to be in Flagstaff with Hobbs and with these guys full-time. Coach Ron Warhurst called me up like, “Hey, come out for a couple weeks, see if you like it. Come hang out with us and, I don’t know, maybe do a camp at altitude with us.”
I ended up loving it and I ended up loving the group. There was just an incredible group of people to where I got something like reinvigorated, I would say, and excited about being a part of this new group, excited about the insights that they had from a training perspective. And I think, just being happy again and super motivated just to be doing well and almost held accountable by my counterparts, like Hobbs. That was a big part in the success.
And we did tweak training here and there, though where it had the same idea behind it. I dunno, for example, we were kind of doing more tempo stuff in Kansas ’cause it was — I mean I’d do like a 4-mile like tempo straight, you know. I guess they call them steady state runs. And I wasn’t gonna be capable of doing that at altitude ‘cause 7000ft — there’s no way I last 4 or 5 miles straight. So we’d just like cut it up and this is where Hobbs’ training side comes into it, where he does intervals to do threshold.
So I did 1000-meter repeats. And I think just being at altitude and doing that, I was able to definitely open up, I guess, new capacity for my aerobic fitness. And I think that showed. I literally came to my first [outdoor] race in LA and I think broke the UCLA track record, 1:43 [1:43.68].
So immediately from there I knew that I had a new level of fitness where like, Oh man, these races are feeling easy almost. Kind of from that training perspective, new environment, new group and some tweaks here and there, definitely I think opened up the ability do what I did this season.
T&FN: I’d like to hear your thoughts on the extremely high level of the 800 at the moment. What’s going on?
Hoppel: OK, I think this is a topic that everyone wants to know about and hasn’t been talked about. Everybody has their theories. I just told you what was different for me. I had a new level of training and a new capacity for stuff. OK, that couldn’t have been a constant across everyone. Everyone was running 1:43s in 2023 and now we’re running 1:41s.
Is it just the level of competition, like we’re all helping each other get to 1:41? I don’t think anyone has the one answer to how are we reaching this new area of the 800m. And I think that’s cool to be a part of. I don’t know the exact stats on it — I should know the exact stats — but literally in the history of track & field, there’d only been like, I think sixteen 1:41s ever run. And then we ran it 12 times in 2024. So it’s like, how do you quantify that? What’s the reasoning for why that happened?
T&FN: Just thinking as somebody who’s watched it for a while, the 2012 Olympics race will always just be — well, it was and still is the World Record race. The past season brought a more extended fireworks display
Hoppel: Right? Yeah, yeah, exactly.
T&FN: Over decades, U.S. 800 running has cycled through highs and lows. There’ll be these long troughs and then all of a sudden… So it’s really cool to see the possibility of a new crest.
Hoppel: Well, it’s funny how perspective can change. ’Cause just last year [2023] or the year before, 800 was a very — I don’t want to say bottom-of-the-barrel event, but we weren’t doing anything spectacular. But it’s the same guys: Marco Arop, myself and all these guys. We’re still the guys that were running. So it’s cool that we get to now be at the top of it and pushing it forward.
We were getting a little flak for not doing great things. But now it’s cool to be finally pushing it forward.
T&FN: You demolished the American Record in Paris and finished just 0.17 short of the bronze. Your thoughts on that?
Hoppel: On the day I raced how I did and I raced against who I did. You know, 4th was the best on the day. It’s tough [laughs].
T&FN: Hobbs Kessler told me that in workouts one wouldn’t necessarily see that you are a 1:41 guy.
Hoppel: No, I agree.
T&FN: Hobbs went on to say you bring the best out of yourself when it counts. As you stood on that starting line in Paris would you have been surprised to hear you’d run that American Record time?
Hoppel: I think if you told me before the race that 1:41 wasn’t gonna medal, I would’ve laughed you off. It’s crazy. And so it is bittersweet to knock at the medal, but again, being at the top of American history in the 800 is definitely a special thing. And now I hope that I can do special things with it. We have another opportunity for a World Championships in Tokyo and then, you know, I’m not that far off. It comes down to 10ths of seconds now. So if I do everything right this year, if we push the needle forward a little more, hopefully maybe I can come out on top this time.
And I think I’m right there with those guys. So I think it’s a matter of shuffling up, making sure what I need to do. And I truly believe, yeah, there’s silver, bronze or gold, you know. Who knows?
T&FN: Will you adjust your training schedule significantly with the World Champs this year set for mid-September? What do you think of that scheduling decision? This year you ran the Olympics and then what are now the second- and fifth-fastest races of your career at the Lausanne (1:42.63) and Chorzów (1:42.32) DLs. Then you went back to the States and did the 5th Avenue Mile.
Hoppel: Honestly, the consensus of athletes and the people that I was around in those races after the Olympics, the theme kind of, is we all kind of want to go home. We had our pinnacle moment and this is what we’ve been working for all year. And now it’s like, “Oh, they still have us racing.”
So I think there’s a format issue with that to where I think they could have rescheduled it so that Paris would be the end. From my perspective, it seemed like the consensus was, “OK, we’re just doing this because these races are here and they need to be done.”
But I think there’s a flaw in it. I’m going to use Cole Hocker as an example. Olympic gold medalist, he was just the champion of the world and beat all these incredible other 1500-meter guys. All right, but now you need Cole Hocker to keep racing and then he loses to all these guys. I just don’t think that’s a good format. You want your champion to be the champion and end with that pinnacle event. And as athletes, you’re inevitably going to see a slow dropoff because, one, we don’t get to be in our training environments.
At this point I’ve been away from Flag [Flagstaff] and I’ve been away from my weightroom, I’ve been away from my ideal training and I’m over in Europe racing. You’re eventually just gonna see a slow dip in times and a slow dip of performance. That’s just not the ideal way to be running and to be performing to the greatest, you know?
T&FN: So having the championship meet wind up the season is a good thing?
Hoppel: It should be, yeah. I think that I’m looking forward to it being that way. That’s the pinnacle moment, that’s what we’re all working towards, and we even make sacrifices throughout the year. Not that we don’t care about the races leading up to Olympics and World Championships, but you make sacrifices — I need to get this workout in, in this week, to fit my training plan and [that week] might have the LA Grand Prix and it’s like, “OK, I’m gonna do the best I can at the LA Grand Prix while still doing what I need to be doing in the workouts.” I think that’s how a lot of people operate.
T&FN: Are there ways you still can take value out of the LA Grand Prix or any meet where you know you won’t be ideally fit or prepared? What do you try to take out of a race like that?
Hoppel: I think experience and, honestly, getting a feel for where your competitors are at and just race sharpness and experience with racing. I think people can make tactical errors you can learn from and then apply to the next race. I don’t want to get into deep waters, but from my perspective it seems like the benefit that you get from running at a race like the LA Grand Prix is you get the feel for racing, whereas, honestly, you might benefit from staying home and training. You’re going outside of your environment, you’re going outside of your ideal training to go do a race that isn’t necessarily essential to medal at the Olympics.
I think you run into different types of people. Maybe some people do race into shape. Not necessarily from the scientific perspective; you should still be doing hard training. I think if you were to ask an athlete like Hobbs, he might want to just stay in his environment and stay training as much as he can. I guess there are ideal situations for different type of athletes.
T&FN: It sure seems to me there’s no substitute for some amount of racing. Right? You just cannot harden yourself into the race mindset without a few races.
Hoppel: Oh, absolutely. Because, well for one, for the 800 specifically I don’t think you’ll be able to simulate that type of pain in your legs or the type of fatigue that an actual 800-meter race puts on the body. You need races for sure to be ready for a pinnacle race. In the championship format you get heats, quarterfinals, semifinals and then the final, so I think that’s beneficial too to where you kind of warm up into it.
T&FN: This is going way back, but Seb Coe, then the 800 World Record-holder, came into the 1984 Olympics behind the 8-ball on training due to a serious illness late in the previous year. I remember reading comments from Coe in which he said he felt he needed X number of races to get sharp for a championships. He came to LA short on races but consciously used his 7 Olympic races over 9 days to get sharp enough to defend his Olympic title in Olympic Record time. He had claimed the 800 silver in 1:43.64; Joaquim Cruz won gold in 1:43.00, then the No. 3 all-time performance.
Race number 7 in that sequence was the winning number that put him in the sweet spot.
Hoppel: I think it’s more feeling in the groove to where you feel comfortable with racing. I think the biggest factors are you need to make sure you’re getting in the training and the buildup that you need to be ready for those races. I don’t think you could ever [pinpoint] like an X amount of races, but you might get an ideal formula from a year prior. Like, this is what you did this year and it worked so maybe you could do better the next year if you changed it up.
I don’t know. I wish there were always perfect answers for it, but I’m honestly going to try something different this year. To one of your earlier questions, I ran the indoor World Championships and obviously that was a big stepping stone for me ‘cause I got to be world champion and it gave me that level of confidence: “OK, I belong, I want to be on the podium in Paris.”
And then you look at it from a different perspective. The guys that beat me in Paris, none of them ran the World Indoor Championships. So did that give them an edge on me or did that help me get to where I was? So yes, you ask questions like that. I think World Indoor Championships was a big step for myself, but at the same time could I have been home training to make sure I was even more ready?
T&FN: There’s got be a cost/benefit question about that. Will you chase a defense of your World Indoor crown this year?
Hoppel: I’m not gonna do the World Indoor Championships this year. I’ll still do U.S. champs and a couple races indoors, but I think, especially with having to travel to China, it could take away from the emphasis to make sure we’re getting as much training as we can.
T&FN: As you know, I just interviewed Hobbs, whom you’re training with. Especially for a 21-year-old, he really seems to know and understand a lot about the sport. What are your thoughts on Kessler?
Hoppel: Oh, he is incredibly intelligent when it comes to the training aspect of it. And I think we have a lot of good people in our corner that provide that information for us. But yeah, he’s doing incredible for himself. I think he has so much more to show. So it will be cool to see his progression over the year. But yeah, it’s been fun to train with him ‘cause like even with him being a 21-year-old, I’ve gained insights from him for training myself. So it’s been cool to be a part of that. Good training partner and hopefully we keep pressing each other along to accomplish new things, for sure.
T&FN: Generic question, perhaps too generic though fans are often curious. What do you do in your free time?
Hoppel: No, it’s fun. Like me and Hobbs, I think one of the biggest things this past season was the culture of our house. It was me, Mason Ferlic, Nate [Mylenek] and Morgan Beadlescomb. We’d be playing video games, having cookouts, hikes, go sit by the lake and stuff. And I dunno, just having that culture of guys together and just doing guy things. I don’t know, going out to the track, playing some spike ball and I dunno, a bunch of outdoor random activities to just bond together. I think being a part of that group was a lot of fun, for sure. ◻︎
