Top Eight Finishers Lowered Personal Bests And Re-Wrote The U.S. Top 10 List; Hiltz, Emily Mackay and Elle St. Pierre All Ran Under 3:56 In Order To Make Team

By Lori Shontz for DyeStat

John Nepolitan photos

EUGENE – The instructions Nikki Hiltz got before the women’s 1,500 meters Sunday afternoon at the 2024 U.S. Olympic Team Trials were clear: Don’t try to make the Olympic team. Try to win a race.

Said Hiltz, “So that’s what I did.”

Hiltz did, indeed, win the race, their second outdoor national championship in a row, and secured a spot on the U.S. team for the Paris Olympics – but that simple statement doesn’t come close to truly capturing what happened.

INTERVIEWS | PHOTOS

The top three finishers broke 3:56. The top eight set PRs and all broke 4 minutes. Hiltz’s time of 3:55.33 broke the meet record, and it’s the second-fastest time in U.S. history, behind only Shelby Houlihan’s American record of 3:54.99 from the 2019 World Championships in Doha.

Even that doesn’t totally capture it. The top seven finishers are now Nos. 2, 3, 4, 6, 10, 11 and 12 in U.S. history.

“I think we completely elevated U.S. distance running today,” silver medalist Emily Mackay said. 

Mackay finished second in 3:55.90, just ahead of her training partner Elle St. Pierre, who finished third in 3:55.99 in her fifth race in 10 days – two rounds of the 5,000 meters, which she won, and two previous rounds of the 1,500.

St. Pierre lowered her PR by .01 … and dropped from second to fourth on the all-time U.S. list.

Sinclaire Johnson, who finished fourth for the second time in a row at the national championship despite Sunday’s PR of 3:56.75, said she thought she was in 3:57 shape. “Which I am, which is nice to know,” she said. “But honestly, I did not think that was not going to make the team. That just shows you where American milers are right now. So impressive.”

St. Pierre pointed out that in 2021, she won the Trials in what was then a meet record, 3:58.03. Now running two seconds faster than her winning time didn’t assure a spot on the team.

Said Hiltz: “Thank God I didn’t look at the clock the whole race. I knew we were running fast, but if someone would have told me this morning that 3:56 doesn’t make the team, I wouldn’t want to know that.”

St. Pierre took the lead immediately, taking the field through 800 meters in 2:05.55. “Mark (Coogan) told me to not run 2:04 through the first 800, so I ran 2:05,” she said, laughing. “I just wanted to make it honest, and I knew I would do the best if I made it fast.”

Johnson tucked in behind St. Pierre. St. Pierre’s New Balance Boston teammates, Mackay and Heather MacLean, began moving up on the third lap, with Hiltz just behind.

At the bell, it was St. Pierre, Johnson and MacLean. Hiltz began moving up on the outside and into third as the field hit the backstretch. That’s when Mackay went wide and moved into second place with 200 to go.

As they hit the frontstretch, St. Pierre and Mackay ran side by side. Hiltz went wide after the final and passed them both with about 75 meters to go.

“I feel like my inner child comes out during a race,” Hiltz said. “That last 100, it was like me and my friends were going to race to the mailbox, and the mailbox was the finish line.”

The United States is sending an exceptionally strong team to Paris. World record holder Faith Kipyegon of Kenya, of course, is still the class of the field. But all of the Trials medalists excelled at the World Indoor Championships in Glasgow, with St. Pierre winning the 3,000 in an American record time, and Hiltz and Mackay going 2-3 in the 1,500 meters.

St. Pierre said she will run the 1,500 in Paris, not the 5,000, and she and everyone in the field know she’s capable of a faster time when she hasn’t just run two rounds of the 5,000.

Mackay said she has some thinking to do.

“My goal was to make the team,” she said. “I thought that it was realistic, but it would be very hard to do. My goal when I hopefully made the team was to make it to the final at the Olympics. That isn’t really changing. Now I’m like, OK, maybe top eight. Top six? Who knows? I have a lot more thinking to do, and I definitely will have to start redefining my goals.”

Hiltz ran 3:59 at The Prefontaine Classic in late May after a double threshold workout on Tuesday of that week, and that this was their first race of the season after a taper.

“That’s a really good sign – when you taper, you can drop time,” Hiltz said. “Especially when you’re just focusing on racing the bodies next to you, time doesn’t matter. … Where I’ll be in a month, I don’t know, and I don’t want to put limits on that.”