2025 Millrose Games – Star power

By Brenn Jones on February 12, 2025 • ( 0 )

In one of the early events at the 2025 Millrose Games, a herd of middle school 800 meter runners thundered around the first turn, starting way too fast. The cascading footfalls evoked the stampede over an open field at the start of a cross-country race. The indoor track of course is more compressed than the great outdoors — the rail dividing spectators from the outside lane vibrates to the collective gallop, the banked track itself gives and takes, the vents overhead spray steam. The venue, the Armory, is like a locomotive, filled with a raucous multigenerational cast of die-hards. It all makes for a timeless, vintage New York City experience.

The relays best exhibit that first-turn energy. Every time a runner takes a baton, a shot of adrenaline launches a race within a race. If you are spectating by that rail, taking it in, watch out! Runners whoosh by inches from your face. Of all the races, relays leave the most numbers, initially affixed to the competitors’ hips, fallen on the track.

While Millrose in its Armory years (since 2012) has attracted many of the best American distance runners, with deeper fields and faster times than at the American indoor championships (or at Millrose in the pre-Armory years at Madison Square Garden), the recent ascendance of the country’s distance running has in turn elevated this meet. It isn’t just Olympic hopefuls giving chase in the longest races — it’s now Olympic medalists — gold medalists, no less. Sure, it would be grand to have Jakob Ingebrigtsen on hand, or had Josh Kerr — who has raced magnificently at this meet — not scratched. And yet the races on Saturday were exquisite without them. You can’t always get what you want, but you got what you needed here, and then some.

To start, the men’s 3000m. Freshly minted 2024 Paris Olympics 1500m gold medalist Cole Hocker versus the 5000m and 10,000m bronze medalist Grant Fisher. Who’ve you got? Or, as one ringside spectator growled after Hocker made a surprise move to the lead with three laps to go, “Who is the dog?” Conventional wisdom would suggest that Hocker wait longer before deploying his kick, but in taking on the pace rather than sitting on Fisher’s shoulder, Hocker made this not just a race for Yared Nuguse’s 7:28 American record, but a race for the 7:23 world record. In each of the last six laps, in fact, both men got progressively faster. Fisher had the last move, whipping around the final curve, arms pumping like pistons, breaking the tape in 7:22.

The women’s 3000m shed several skins before revealing a winner. Australia’s Jessica Hull and then Ethiopia’s Tsigie Gebreselama led a serpentine pack for 13 of the 15 laps before track reminded us than unlike most sports, with their binary outcomes, this is a multiverse. With two laps to go Josette Andrews — runner-up in the 2022 and 2023 Wanamaker Miles — sprung to the front, opened a gap, and seemed to have it, at long last. But wait! Fellow American Whittni Morgan, legs flailing, pogoed around Andrews, running sub-29 on the last lap, as every other runner ran 31 seconds and up.

In dominating recent Wanamaker Miles, Elle Purrier St. Pierre has taken it out hard and dared anyone to go with her. Elle wasn’t in this one, though, and this race was not that. Given the slow start, it seemed well set up for the fast finishers, such as American champion Nikki Hiltz, resplendent in their white Lululemon kit. One keen observer trackside had the race pegged though, predicting instead that Olympic 1500m bronze medalist Georgia Bell from England would emerge from the pack. Emerge she did, on the very last straightaway, from 3rd to first. “She’s a dog!” the fan exclaimed, on a day when canines seemed to be on people’s minds. “She is dirty!”

The grand finale to this day of incredible racing, including a 5:24 world record mile walk, and a 3:47 mile by an 18-year-old, was a ringer. While the spirit of competition explains these performances — nobody runs world records alone — the competitive nature varies from runner to runner, and the way a runner harnesses it varies from race to race. The best milers in the world not in this race — Hocker, Ingebrigtsen, Kerr — can be brash, nervy, combative, tightly wound. It seems to explain their greatness. But Yared Nuguse, the favorite in this race, comes across as none of those things.

With Kerr scratched, all eyes were on the long, lean runner to set the world record in the Wanamaker Mile. He took it on, tracking the pacer through the 800 in 1:52, but couldn’t shake the metronomic phenom Hobbs Kessler. With 300 meters to go, Nuguse’s teeth were visible, and he wasn’t smiling. Kessler, with shorter strides and higher cadence, appeared likely to get him. And it stayed that way until the end, Kessler seeming to catch up, but Nuguse somehow keeping his form and holding him off, in a world record 3:46. To turn oneself inside out like that without a shred of malice is a pure, sacrificial thing, a privilege to behold.