Yared Nuguse, AR holder in the mile, ended his season with a big win in Hawaii on the road mile last Saturday, and I missed this piece from our friends at Race Results Weekly!
NUGUSE WINS KALAKAUA MERRIE MILE IN ROAD RACE DEBUT
By Rich Sands, @sands
(c) 2023 Race Results Weekly, all rights reserved, used with permission
HONOLULU (09-Dec) -– Yared Nuguse capped a breakthrough year with a thrilling win in the Kalakaua Merrie Mile here, the first road race of his career. After setting an ambitious early pace, he prevailed in a unique mixed-sex pursuit format that saw the professional women start 30 seconds ahead of the men over the out-and-back course in Waikiki. Prize money was awarded on the combined order of finish.
“It was a really intense race,” said Nuguse, the On Athletics Club star, who broke the American record for the track mile in September with a sensational 3:43.97 at the Diamond League final. “That whole chasing-the-women format had me on edge for a lot of that race. It ended up being such an exciting race at the finish, so I’m very happy to be here.”
The women’s field set off at a relatively conservative early pace, despite knowing that would likely play to the men’s advantage. “Yeah, that’s always the concern,” admitted Nikki Hiltz, who identifies as transgender and non-binary and competes in the women’s division. “But I think I accepted it the first day here. The men are gonna blow by us, but maybe I’d have enough to go with them.”
And that’s more or less how it played out. “That was a real interesting component,” Vince Ciattei of the Under Armour Mission Run/Dark Sky Distance team said of the pursuit. “I thought a lot about that before the race, and then honestly Yared took a lot of the guesswork out of that. The way that we went out I trusted that if I followed him, we were gonna catch them.”
The pace settled down in the second quarter as they approached a hairpin turn just past the halfway point. “We hit the turn pretty aggressive, so that thinned it out [among the men],” said the Very Nice Track Club’s Hobbs Kessler, who won the inaugural World Athletics Road Running Championships road mile on October 1. “And then I was sniffing blood with a little over 400 to go and I started pressing really hard. I created a little gap on Yared, not much, and caught up to the women.”
With the battle of the sexes decided, the race turned into a three-man dogfight….
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