The last lap is settled three laps earlier

A championship final is not a time trial, and the runner who treats it like one has already lost.

Watch a slow tactical final and count how many athletes are actually racing. Usually two. The rest are queueing.

That queue is the whole event. In a paced race the clock does the thinking for you: you sit on a shoulder, the effort is handed over in even slices, and the only question is whether you can hold on. Take the pacemaker away and the effort stops being even. It becomes a series of small bets. Do I cover that move with three hundred to go, knowing the man who made it cannot sustain it, or do I let him go and trust I can eat the gap later with a faster finish than his?

Coaches talk about the last lap as though it were a separate skill, a kick that some athletes have and others do not. I think that is mostly wrong. The kick is a withdrawal. What determines its size is how much you spent in the three laps nobody was watching, and specifically how many times you accelerated. Acceleration is expensive in a way that steady speed is not. Every surge, every reaction to a surge, every drift wide to get out of trouble on the bend costs more than the pace chart says it should, because you are paying to change velocity rather than to hold it.

Which is why boxing an athlete in is a genuine tactic and not just bad luck. If you are trapped on the rail with two hundred to go, your escape is not free. You either wait, and give up metres, or you go around three people, which is a surge plus extra distance, and you arrive at the home straight having already made your one big withdrawal.

The athletes who win these races are usually the ones who made the fewest decisions. They ran wide of trouble from the gun, accepted a couple of extra metres per lap as an insurance premium, and never had to accelerate to solve a problem someone else created.

So when a final goes out in a jog and the split looks embarrassing, I do not think the race was slow. The work simply moved. It went into positioning, into refusing to react, into standing a metre off the kerb for most of the race and staying calm while faster men boxed themselves in front of you.