Purpose : The men’s athletics 1500-m final of the Paris Olympics was won by Cole Hocker in 3:27.65 minutes:seconds.milliseconds. Interestingly, defending Olympic Champion and prerace favorite Jakob Ingebrigtsen led for ∼1450 m before being overran by Hocker, who drafted his way through the race, taking the lead with ∼50 m to run. Given the contrasting strategies employed, this study explored the impact of drafting on D′ balance and predicted finish times for determining the race outcome between Ingebrigtsen and Hocker. Methods : Ingebrigtsen and Hocker’s critical speed (in meters per second) and D′ (in meters) were calculated from personal best race performances over 1500 to 5000 m. Critical speed and D′ were used to calculate prerace 1500 m finish time. One hundred-meter segmental running speeds at the Paris Olympics 1500-m final were used to calculate segmental D′ balance for Ingebrigtsen and Hocker before and after the consideration of drafting. Throughout the race, critical speed and D′ balance were used to provide updated predicted finish times, with and without the consideration of drafting. The impact of drafting was set at 2.18% of segmental running speed. Results : Prerace and within-race predicted times (not considering drafting) favored Ingebrigtsen beating Hocker by 4.2 seconds. When considering drafting, within-race predicted times favored Hocker beating Ingebrigtsen at the 1300- and 1400-m segments by 0.1 and 0.4 seconds, respectively. Conclusions : Without a consideration for drafting, prerace and within-race predicted times favored Ingebrigtsen beating Hocker at the Paris Olympics 1500-m final. However, when drafting was considered, eventual gold medalist Hocker was favored to beat Ingebrigtsen, indicating the potential role that drafting played on this race outcome.
Bellenger et al. (Thu,) studied this question.