IT’S HARD TO IMAGINE a more improbable athletic leap for an American middle distance runner than charging, virtually unknown, on to the elite stage from the dark murk of a world pandemic. Yet that’s what then-Michigan prep Hobbs Kessler did in 2021 when he lowered the 1500 HSR to 3:34.36 in May of that year and adidas signed him to a contract.
That bumps along the road followed for 2-plus years was far less shocking than the unlooked for performances that landed Kessler at the level he’d reached in the first place.
Not until October of ’23 did Kessler break the dam when his mile win at the World Road Champs put him on a T&FN cover 2-years-minus-a-month after his first front-page appearance as ’21 Boys High School Athlete Of The Year.
Kessler at 20 was a contender again. Maybe. The road mile championship had no history. Yet, as illustrated most recently by his never-conceding 1500/3000 double win at this season’s USATF Indoor, he was ready in all respects.
It’s no secret now that 2024 — highlighted by a World Indoor bronze and pitched battle in Paris to 5th in the fastest-ever Olympic final — puts Kessler in the conversation right along with the Games’ U.S. medal-winning duo, Cole Hocker (gold) and Yared Nuguse (bronze).
Kessler is the youngest of the dynamic trio — he turns 22 this March — and the first American to race both the 1500 and 800 at a Games since 1976.
T&FN welcomed a catchup at the end of ’24 with the erstwhile international youth rock climbing competitor. He’s at a new athletic altitude and he probably had a story to tell. Sure enough, Kessler did — with a keen depth of analysis that belies his age and bodes well for his future.
T&FN: You had one heckuva season in 2024.
Kessler: Yeah, it was good.
T&FN: Put in terms of PRs, you made a 3-second-plus drop in the 1500, a 2-second drop in the 800. Two seconds-plus (2.16), in fact. That’s not easy to do.
You made the Olympic team in two events, the first American to do so since Rick Wohlhuter in 1976. Then you placed 5th in an all-time amazing 1500 final with a sub-3:30 PR, 3:29.45. That all followed your first international medal on the track, 1500 bronze at the World Indoor in Glasgow.
Kessler: Yep, yep.
T&FN: Lots of moves in a positive…
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