AMERICAN RECORD FOR NUGUSE IN WANAMAKER MILE
By David Monti, @d9monti
(c) 2022 Race Results Weekly, all rights reserved – Used with permission.
NEW YORK (11-Feb) — Yared Nuguse of the On Athletics Club capped an electric 115th Millrose Games at the Nike Track & Field Center at The Armory this afternoon with a history-making run in the Rudin Wanamaker Mile, smashing Bernard Lagat’s American record by more than two seconds and running the second-fastest time in history: 3:47.38. He missed Ethiopian Yomif Kejelcha’s 2019 world indoor record of 3:47.01 by just 37/100ths of a second.
“Coming down the line –I thought it was kind of funny– there was like this one person kind of standing in front of the middle number (of the race clock), so I couldn’t see how close I was (to the record),” Nuguse told a clutch of reporters after the race. “I thought I was close. To be that close was kind of interesting. It shows me that next year… I might actually be able to get it.”
Nuguse benefited from pitch-perfect pacemaking by Erik Sowinski who was asked to go through the halfway mark in 1:53 (the split clock showed 1:52.99). At that point Nuguse was sitting in fourth place behind his training mates Mario Garcia Romo of Spain and Oliver Hoare of Australia (Hoare was the race’s defending champion). Nuguse felt very comfortable with his position, and the race was playing out just as he had hoped.
“Running that race the way we did, with… all three of us right there up front for that first half of the race kind of felt good,” Nuguse explained. “Knowing that I had my closest guys having my back.
Sowinski stepped off the track on the backstretch, and the pace immediately sagged. The third quarter was covered in only 59.4 seconds, and Britain’s Neil Gourley had caught up with the On team and was now running second. It was going to take a mighty final quarter to get below 3:50, but Nuguse was ready. He surged at the end of the penultimate lap, opened up a gap before the bell, then charged full speed ahead into the final lap.
“That last part was just give it everything I had,” said Nuguse, who ran his final quarter in 54.3 seconds. “I was able to close in something crazy and get it.”
Gourley, who won the mile one week ago at the New Balance Indoor Grand Prix in Boston, closed in 56.1 to get second in 3:49.46. That made him just the ninth man in history to run sub-3:50 indoors (Nuguse is the eighth). Hoare took third in 3:50.83, New Zealand’s Sam Tanner got…
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