“I kind of told myself that I’m in this race too,” Hocker said after the event, per ESPN. “If they let me fly under the radar, then so be it. I think that might’ve just been the best.”
Kerr ultimately took the silver medal, while USA’s Nuguse earned bronze.
Ingebrigsten, for his part, fell to the fourth position. “I opened with a 54-second lap,” the Norwegian athlete said of his running after the event. “That wasn’t the plan at all. It was at least two seconds too fast. I was thinking about slowing down, but the next lap was almost the same speed. I ruined it for myself by going way too hard.”
But while Hocker’s win may have shocked viewers, the runner himself never doubted his chances.
“It might be an upset to a lot of people,” he noted after the event, “but if you’ve been following my season, you’d know I’d be capable of it.”
