From High School Phenom to Olympic Contender: How Middle-Distance Runner Hobbs Kessler is Gaining Confidence on the Road to Paris

Three years ago, at the 2021 U.S. Olympic Team Trials – Track & Field for the Olympic Games Tokyo 2020, Hobbs Kessler made a splashy debut as a professional athlete.

Just 18 at the time, he was coming off a sensational senior year of high school and was one of the most-hyped American runners of 2021. He didn’t qualify for those Olympics, but now as a seasoned veteran at the age of 21, Kessler established himself as one of the top contenders for the Olympic Games Paris 2024 roster, to be determined at the 2024 U.S. Olympic Team Trials – Track & Field, to be held June 21-30 at Hayward Field in Eugene, Oregon.

Kessler was a relative latecomer to running. His first love was sport climbing, and at age 16 he represented the U.S. at the 2019 IFSC Youth World Championships. But by 2021, the Ann Arbor, Michigan, native emerged as a track and field prodigy, breaking the national high school record in the indoor mile with a spectacular 3:57.66 clocking. Then during the outdoor season, he set an U.S. Under-20 record in the 1500 meters of 3:34.36 (a time that only five other American men bettered that year).

On the eve of the Olympic trials, he signed a professional contract with Adidas and was ready to make the jump to elite competition. He acquitted himself nicely, advancing to the semifinals of the 1,500 meters. 

High expectations had been set, but there would be a bumpy transition to this new level of competition. In 2022, his first full year running professionally, Kessler didn’t advance out of the heats at the USA Track & Field Outdoor Championships and saw only marginal improvement in his times. 

Things started to turn around in 2023, including a new personal best in the 1500 (3:32.61) at the Los Angeles Grand Prix in May. He made the finals at USATF Championships in July, bit finished sixth and did not qualify for the World Athletics Championships later that summer. 

Another opportunity did present itself, however, and Kessler made his Team USA debut at the inaugural World Athletics Road Running Championships in Riga, Latvia, in October. Thanks to perfectly timed finishing kick, he scored the gold medal in a thrilling race. “That was pure euphoria,” he says of his exuberant finish-line reaction as he broke the tape. “I knew in the back of my head I could win it, but I’ve thought that a lot and also not won a lot. So you never know. It was a huge breakthrough. It felt good to cap off two disappointing years with a big win.”

He parlayed that confidence boost into a solid fall training block at high altitude in Flagstaff, Arizona, with his teammates at the Very Nice Track Club and new training partner Bryce Hoppel, a U.S. Olympian in the 800 meters in 2021. “It’s been fun hanging out with him,” Kessler says. “He’s been on the circuit, so I’ve learned a lot from him. He’s naturally calm and relaxed and I think being around that has really helped me.”

Kessler broke up the training with an occasional return to his first love, taking trips last fall to Red River Gorge in Kentucky for climbing. “It’s just one of those things that feels right to me,” he says. “The act itself feels so good. I love the puzzle of it, I love the challenge of it, I love the social aspects, I love being outside. It’s just an amazing thing.”

As the Olympic year began, Kessler knew he needed to continue to bolster his confidence, so he lined up an ambitious schedule of indoor races for the winter. “I went into the indoor season with the goal of trying to be better tactically, better mentally, to set myself up well for the Olympic trials,” he says. “And I thought the best way to do that was to race a bunch and put myself in scary situations.”

One such moment came at his opening meet of the year, February’s New Balance Indoor Grand Prix in Boston. “Before the first race I was pretty jittery, I remember being in the hotel room 30 minutes before, just terrified of the race,” he says. He overcame those nerves and won that 1,500, then a week later finished second to American-record holder Yared Nuguse in the Wanamaker Mile at the Millrose Games (smashing his personal best with a 3:48.66 clocking, making him the second-fastest American of all time indoors).

A runner-up finish to Cole Hocker at the USATF Indoor Championships earned Kessler a spot at the World Athletics Indoor Championships in Glasgow, Scotland, in early March.

Once again, Kessler’s nerves nearly got the better of him. “When I was warming up [for the final] I was already analyzing what went wrong and what I could do better next time,” he admits. “And at some point I realized that the race didn’t even happen yet, and I made a decision to really force myself to get after it, even if it doesn’t feel natural.”

While he was in the call room before his race, he watched on a TV monitor as Hoppel won the 800 meters. Buoyed by that, Kessler took the track for his event and continued to recalibrate his mindset. He found himself at the front of the pack for most of the race, the perfect spot to avoid the chaos that had led to several runners falling in the preliminary round. “There are a lot of big guys going fast around a small track, so I didn’t want to get caught up in any stumbling, so that was the safest spot to be,” he says. “It had the side effect of really keeping me mentally engaged.”

He held the lead until the final strides, when New Zealand’s Geordie Beamish came sprinting by for the win and Hocker edged ahead for silver. Kessler hung on for the bronze, calling it “the biggest mental breakthrough, because at that point I was low on bandwidth, I was kinda fried. I had taken so many big steps (during the indoor season) and was a little mentally tired from it, but I was still able to put together a good race. That gave me so much more trust in myself to be on the line knowing I can handle the situation.”

Now he’s ready for the pressure cooker of the Olympic trials, no longer the naive rookie that he was three years ago. A win would be nice, but there are three team spots up for grabs. 

“I want to make the team. If that’s first, second or third, I don’t care. I hope it’s first. I think it can be,” he says. “But there are plenty of really good runners who also think they can be first. I just wanna be on that team headed to Paris. And the U.S. is so deep that if you can make the U.S. team you can do well on the world stage. I really want to make the team and I think I can. I don’t think it’ll be easy. I don’t think it’s a given by any means, but I do like the position that I’m in.”