Rio Olympian Chris O’Hare on why Josh Kerr and Jakob Ingebrigtsen have made a big difference to middle-distance running
The talking is over and the fighters are about to get in the ring again. This time, the purple track at the Stade de France is the venue for the next bout between the world’s 1500m heavyweights – yet the man who it could be argued helped to start the fight in the first place won’t be anywhere near it.
Chris O’Hare Olympic
Despite his young son’s belief that having a tattoo of the Olympic rings automatically qualifies you to compete, there will be no place on the start line at a second Games for Chris O’Hare. Having retired in 2022, the Rio Olympian’s time is now taken up with his job in real estate, life as a husband and father of three and coaching his training group of high school age athletes.
But, like much of the watching athletics world, from his home in Tulsa he will be a particularly keen spectator when the first punches are thrown in what promises to be a middle-distance slugfest in Paris. As an event, the 1500m is moving at a rapid pace and there are a number of serious contenders converging on France from all across the globe, but it is the match-up between two particularly big hitters that really whets the appetite.
Since the moment Josh Kerr repeated Jake Wightman’s trick of beating Jakob Ingebrigtsen in Budapest last summer, the world champion and the current Olympic champion have frequently traded verbal blows. Their dislike for one another has not so much been thinly disguised as openly discussed. “We’re not friends. We don’t hang out, we don’t text,” said Kerr earlier this year.
That comment came right before the one and only time the pair have faced each other this year – in fact the only time they have set foot on the same track since the Scot’s night of crowning glory in Hungary – to contest the Bowerman Mile at the Pre Classic meeting in Eugene at the end of May.
O’Hare describes what happened next as “probably the most confident piece of running I’ve seen since Matt Centrowitz won [1500m gold] in Rio” as Kerr hit the front from a long way out and saw off his big rival, breaking Steve Cram’s long-standing British record with a time of 3:45.34. That display followed up another commanding performance, when Kerr won the world indoor 3000m title in front of a home crowd in Glasgow.
His fellow Edinburgh AC clubmate has been impressing O’Hare for some time. The pair frequently used to train together on the now demolished Meadowbank Stadium track, with
Kerr taking his first notable steps in the sport at a time when O’Hare was in his mid-teens and would soon approach a decision over his future that involved moving to the US and the tough school of NCAA competition.
Josh Kerr (Jan Figueroa)
Speak to the likes of Kerr and Wightman, another athlete nurtured by Edinburgh AC, and it’s O’Hare who is often cited as a big influence, the one who got the ball rolling, who showed what might be possible, and one of the reasons why there are two Scots in the men’s 1500m British Olympic line-up for Paris (don’t forget about US-based Neil Gourley). So, yes, the impending clash of the titans is partly thanks to O’Hare.
“It was exciting for me to be the springboard, if you will, or the stepping stone,” he says. “It’s great to be a part of the history that led to two world champions and two Meadowbank-bred world champions at that, which is crazy. It would have been nice for it to be me but that’s just the way the cookie crumbles!”
The last remark is accompanied by a hearty laugh, the fondness and affection for those Edinburgh days clear as O’Hare casts his mind back to his regular encounters with Kerr.
“Josh and I trained with each other,” he says. “Dave Campbell’s group at Meadowbank year
after year was probably one of the best age group set-ups in Europe. When Josh really started to get into it I was 16, 17, 18 and then when I went off to the NCAA Josh came up and dragged people behind him as well.
“Dave always implemented a handicap system – so if I was doing 1000m reps, Josh would be doing 800s or something like that so we did a lot of work together. Then, whenever I was back from Tulsa for summer or for Christmas I did all my training with Josh and the group there. My younger brother Dominic is Josh’s age and was training as well. We would always link back up.
“And then we gave Josh as much information as we could when it came time for him to make the decision about do I stay here or do I go to the US? And that obviously worked out okay for him.”
Chris O’Hare wins the Westminster Mile (Mark Shearman)
Indeed it did. Kerr was recruited by the University of New Mexico and moved out to the US at the age of 17. He would go on to win NCAA titles on the way to his current set-up, working with coach Danny Mackey and the Seattle-based Brooks Beasts team. O’Hare now sees an athlete who is a true force to be reckoned with.
Kerr’s burning ambition is to upgrade the bronze medal he won in Tokyo three years ago and the man himself says: “It is a very fortunate position to be in and one that I am probably not going to be in many more times in my career – being fit, healthy and ready to go and win an Olympic Games.
“Experiencing pressure in these situations is a privilege. I have earned that pressure because of the performances I’ve put together. I had a home World Indoor Championships this year and I had a lot of races that had a lot of pressure with it. I don’t love the racing scenarios where there is nothing on the line, it doesn’t let me do what I want to do properly. When the pressure is on is when I thrive.”
Confidence has never been an issue for the 26-year-old, says O’Hare, but he insists his fellow countryman has very much earned his current position at the sharp end of his event.
“When you’re a world champion and you haven’t had any major injuries that we know of – touch wood – you can only draw confidence from that,” he continues. “Josh has always been a confident person anyway so when he comes out to the track it’s like: ‘Okay lads, take your best shot – but it’s not going to be good enough’.
“That’s a great spot to be in and Josh’s confidence reminds me of [Matt] Centrowitz’s confidence. It’s something I was always striving for – to try and be that confident.
“From the outside looking in it can be perceived as arrogant – and people who don’t know him could perceive him as arrogant – but that’s what it takes to have that real inner confidence where you’re not just kind of faking it.
“Why wouldn’t you be confident when you’re good? He’s managed to leverage that and, as the confidence grows, the ability grows. But it’s also his desire and his willingness to hurt that have gotten him to where he is.”
Matt Centrowitz (Getty)
The same could be said for Ingebrigtsen, another individual who is not shy of speaking his mind. O’Hare competed against the Norwegian, and his brothers, many times and saw first hand the breakthrough of a teenage prodigy at the European Championships of 2018.
He doesn’t see any major change in Jakob, who threw down the gauntlet with a European
record-breaking run in Monaco, but believes any friction has come from the fact that someone who had become so accustomed to winning has been destabilised by defeat to first Wightman and then Kerr in world finals. It’s one of the reasons why the trash talking has been so prominent and O’Hare, for one, has been enjoying that soap opera.
“The general consensus in years past has been: ‘Just be quiet and do your work on the track because there’s going to be somebody sitting on the couch at home that pipes up and goes: ‘I don’t like that guy because he talks too much’,” he says.
“A lot of [the talk between Kerr and Ingebrigtsen] is exacerbated by the media and, from a five-minute interview, they pick two seconds to latch on to, which is how things get sold. I think it [the rivalry] gets blown up more than it actually is, but it’s exciting from the outside. It certainly draws more eyes to the 1500m, which is always a good thing.
“Jakob is the same guy as he was when I was racing against him in 2018, 2019. He’s a super, super confident person and why would he have any reason not to be? But Josh has done a great job of going ‘okay, whatever mate’.
“History has shown us that whenever things don’t go to plan for Jakob there’s a reason for it. Now there’s always a reason but it’s a fine line to walk between reasons and excuses. Sometimes you just get beaten because somebody is better than you.”
The men’s 1500m won’t be just be a two-horse race, of course, and O’Hare believes the nature of the event has been changed markedly by shoe technology.
“It’s almost a different race 1722596986 due to the shoes,” he says. “It has changed the way that races are run, especially at major championships, because you can run in the low 3:30s over multiple rounds and you’re not getting quite as beaten up as you would have previously. It has made things tactically different. But everybody has access to it now. It’s not like some people have it and some people don’t, like it was when Nike first released the spikes. They’ve been around long enough now, where their returns are being realised by everyone and not just by a select few, which levelled the playing field.”
It means the threats will be many and why O’Hare still believes that: “For anybody to win a World Championships or an Olympic Games, the stars have to align.”
He is expecting to see a strong showing from the British contingent that also includes George Mills. As O’Hare points out, it’s now a serious accomplishment to get into the national team in
the first place.
Josh Kerr follows Jakob Ingebrigtsen (Getty)
Whereas in 2016, where he and Charlie Grice were the only two athletes with the Olympic standard to their name ahead of the British Championships, just a year later, O’Hare won the national title being pushed all the way by Wightman, Kerr and Gourley. That’s when he could feel the momentum really beginning to build and sees it as a particularly big positive that each has found a different route to the top.
“They’ve all been on a pretty similar trajectory, since they were racing in the age groups,” says O’Hare, “but then they have paved their own path and made their own way, made their own decisions about what shoe companies they are going to go with, where they’re going to be based and how they’re going to do things.
“Instead of just being: ‘You have to be based in Loughborough, and you have to come and do this, or you’re toast’ it’s testament to the fact that if you give people the autonomy to do what they want to do and surround themselves with the teams that they want to surround themselves with, instead of a governing body team, then they can do well. It’s fun to see them take three different routes and end up in pretty much the same position.”
He adds: “Jake and Josh were so very good at a European level from when they were in the age groups and so they really have just progressively kept working their way up all the way to the top. And the exciting thing for both of them, and also for Neil, is that they don’t appear to be maxed out.”
Let battle recommence.
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