Atlanta a Key Stop on the Road to Paris

As Olympic track and field action gets underway, keep an eye out for some familiar faces. Dozens of athletes in Paris have recently graced Atlanta Track Club events, from the world's largest 10K to the sprint-heavy adidas Atlanta City Games.

Representing at least 14 countries, the athletes range from the 2023 Atlanta Journal-Constitution Peachtree Road Race winner to a college pole vaulter whose career breakthrough came this spring in Piedmont Park, with some of the marquee names favored to bring home the gold in between.

Of the six athletes representing Team USA in the Olympic Marathon on Aug. 10-11, five have raced in Atlanta Track Club events.

Conner Mantz, winner of the men's Olympic Marathon Trials in February, finished fifth in the 2022 Peachtree, not only as top American but also posting the second-fastest finishing time ever by an American in the race's history. The year before, Clayton Young, runner-up in the Trials, finished third. For both, Peachtree was their debut at the distance - perhaps not a coincidence given that their coach, Ed Eyestone, himself a two-time Olympian, won here in 1991. The third-place Trials finisher, Leonard Korir, won the Peachtree and the U.S. 10 km Championships it hosted in 2017.

For the women, 2024 Trials runner-up Emily Sisson, the American Record-holder in the marathon, was top American in the 50th Running of the Peachtree. Joining her in Paris is surprise third-place Trials finisher Dakotah Lindwurm, top American in the 2022 Publix Atlanta Half Marathon.

All but Mantz also tackled the streets of Atlanta in the 2020 U.S. Olympic Team Trials - Marathon, with Korir just missing the team when he finished fourth.

Leading the way to Paris among international athletes is 2023 Peachtree champion Fotyen Tesfay, who chose to forgo a title defense last month as she trained to represent Ethiopia in the 10,000 meters.

Also competing in Paris distance events is Whittni Morgan, second in the 2022 Northside Hospital Atlanta Women's 5K, who will make her Olympic debut for Team USA in the 5,000-meter.

Athletes from both the 2023 and 2024 adidas Atlanta City Games are among those in the brightest spotlight in these Olympics - headlined by six-time World Champion Noah Lyles. Lyles, who tied the American record when he defended his City Games 150-meter title in May, is seeking at least three gold medals - at 100 and 200 meters and the 4x100m relay - and has not been shy about signaling his availability to go after another in the 4x400, as well.

Among his challengers will be City Games podium finishers Zharnel Hughes of Great Britain, the British record-holder in the 100 and 200; Jamaica's Oblique Seville; South Africa's Akani Simbine; and Kenya's Ferdinand Omanyala, all in the toplists as some of the fastest men in the world this year.

Almost half the field of the 2024 City Games will compete in Paris, and Lyles isn't the only star among them who comes into Paris among the favorites to win a gold medal.

• Grant Holloway, who ran what was then a world-leading time of 13.07 in the 110-meter hurdles on a temporary straightaway in Piedmont Park this May, said after making Team USA a few weeks later that he has "unfinished business" in Paris after leaving the 2020 Tokyo Olympics with a silver medal. The five-time World Champion and 60-meter hurdles World Record-holder who hasn't lost a race at that distance since he was a high school sophomore 10 years ago, is missing only Olympic gold on his resume.
  

• Gabby Thomas, the Harvard University graduate who competed here at 150m last year, will toe the line at 200m as the fourth-fastest woman in history.

• Tobi Amusan was runner-up in the City Games 100m hurdles, but the World Record-holder and 2022 World Champion from Nigeria will want to improve on her fourth-place finish in the Tokyo Games, where she just missed a medal.
  

Tara Davis-Woodhall and Anna Hall, who faced each other in the long jump in Piedmont Park, will be chasing gold in separate events in Paris: Davis-Woodhall (the vivacious reigning World Indoor Champion) in the long jump and Hall in the heptathlon. Hall, a two-time World Championships medalist, has fought back from a broken foot that kept her out of the 2020 Games and knee surgery just last January; she competed at both the 100m hurdles and long jump in Atlanta as part of her latest comeback.

Two young American stars in the middle distances, Bryce Hoppel and Hobbs Kessler, ran the City Games in 2023. Hoppel, who notched a win at 600m in a race that fittingly began and ended at the Olympic Rings statue in Centennial Olympic Park, is the reigning World Indoor Champion at 800m and will contest that distance in Paris. Kessler, who turned professional right out of high school - after representing the U.S. several times as a national-caliber rock climber - was barely 20 when he finished as a strong runner-up in the 2018 mile; he will do Olympic double-duty in the 800m and 1500m.

But even as Piedmont Park hosted some of the top names in the sport, it also served as the breakout competition for pole vaulter Brynn King, a Division II college senior who stunned World Indoor Champion Molly Caudery for the City Games win. A week later, King won the NCAA Div. II title before making Team USA under the tutelage of Jenn Suhr, her coach at Roberts Wesleyan University and the 2012 Olympic gold medalist. King and Caudery, who represents Great Britain, will meet again on the runway in Stade de France.

The 2024 Olympic Track and Field competition began yesterday with the racewalks and will conclude on August 11 with the women's marathon. Events will air on NBC, USA Network and E!, with streaming available on Peacock, NBCOlympics.com and the NBC Olympics app. For a full schedule, click here.