‘Heartbreaking’: Bryce Hoppel breaks US 800 record in Olympic final, falls short of medal

SAINT-DENIS, France ― Bryce Hoppel ran the race of his life Saturday at the Stade de France, breaking the American record in the 800 meters by nearly a full second in the process.

And it still wasn’t enough to get him on the medal stand.

“Heartbreaking,” he called it, more than once.

Hoppel, a Midland native who keeps a home in Dallas, ran 1:41.67, a time that would have been fast enough for gold in Tokyo but was .17 behind Algeria’s Djamel Sedjati, who won bronze.

Coming in a breakout year at 26 years old in which he won the 800 at the world indoor championships and broke the meet record at the Olympic trials, Hoppel had high hopes for Paris after failing to make the finals in Tokyo. He’d moved from Kansas, where he’d been a five-time All-American and two-time national champ, to Flagstaff, Ariz., to train at higher altitude with encouraging results.

He second-guessed himself Saturday for not pushing the pace harder further out, allowing too many runners to get ahead of him on the last lap.

“It’s frustrating,” he said, barely holding his emotions. “I know I have the strength to push it from further out, but it’s always hard to make the decisions in the moment. You never know what’s left in your legs.

“Hard to look back on.”

He would have figured 1:41.67 was good enough for the podium before the race, but the competition keeps getting better. His own time bested a mark set in 2019 by Texas A&M’s Donavan Brazier, who broke a record that had stood for 34 years.

Did a national record at least mitigate some of the heartbreak?

“It makes it a little bit better,” he said. “It still makes it very bittersweet. I think it kind of hits hard, because, I mean, I did everything I could, gave it everything I had, and it still wasn’t enough.”

Finishing so close after a year of changes gives him comfort that he’ll continue to keep up with a field running away from history. He looks forward to the next Olympics in Los Angeles. Maybe more records in between.

But, Saturday, even a record wasn’t much solace.

“Still would have been better to have any color medal around the neck,” he said.

“So it’s tough.”

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