Matthew Centrowitz changed the American mindset

EUGENE — I don’t remember exactly when Matthew Centrowitz moved in with us.

It was sometime in late in 2011 or early 2012, around the time Centrowitz was beginning to change how a generation of middle and long-distance runners viewed themselves in the world.

He’s been there ever since, adorning the second door on the left, arms crossed, bold, brash and brave ready to take on the world, history and conventional wisdom be damned. He is on all four walls of the back bedroom he shares with our son Frankie, an aspiring miler, Tom Brady, Marcus Rashford and James Bond.

No one has ever suggested he was out of place.

Cooper Teare also grew up with a photo of Centrowitz on his bedroom wall in Alameda.

“He was my idol, for sure,” Teare, the 2022 U.S. 1,500 champion, said.

For parts of four decades American heroes were hard to find for skinny kids who thought they could only race the wind.

“When I was growing up the narrative was Americans couldn’t compete with the East Africans,” said Grant Fisher, the Olympic Trials 10,000 meter winner who was fourth in the event at the 2022 World Championships.

No one did more to change that narrative than Centrowitz, Maryland-born, Oregon-bred.

Centrowitz, 34, withdrew this week from the Olympic Trials at Hayward Field, the track that first launched him to superstar status, a hamstring ending his bid to make a fourth U.S. Olympic team and likely his career in major international championships.

He leaves the global stage the greatest ever American miler not named Jim Ryun and arguably the greatest tactician of his generation.

His victory in the 2016 Olympic Games 1,500 final was nothing less than a tactical masterpiece. If the rest of the world shared the late Steve Prefontaine’s belief that running was a work of art then Centrowitz’s historic triumph in Rio de Janeiro would be in the Louvre next to the Mona Lisa.

Centrowitz controlled the final almost from gun, retaining the lead through a slow, at times plodding, at times physical race and then holding off Olympic champion Taoufik Makhloufi of Algeria through a frantic last lap for a 3-minute, 50-second victory.

Centrowitz, gold medal around his neck, was still trying to find his bearings at the dizzying height of the top step on the Olympic Stadium medal podium that night when he was approached by Lord Sebastian Coe.

Coe, the president of the track and field’s global governing body and two-time Olympic 1,500-meter champion, was presenting gifts to the medalists as part of the medal ceremony.As the pair shook hands, Coe smiled and leaned close to Centrowitz.

“Welcome to the club,” Coe said.

Before Centrowitz, no American had joined the club since Mel Sheppard won the 1908 Olympic gold medal.

“Winning the gold medal I think was more difficult than setting a world record,” said Dave Wilborn, the former Oregon school record holder in the mile and one of the top U.S. middle distance runners in the 1960s. “Just look at” Morocco’s Hicham El Guerrouj, the world record-holder in the 1,500 and mile for the past quarter-century, “it took him three Olympics to get the gold medal.”

Three Americans covered 1,500 faster than Centrowitz’s personal best of 3:30.50. Five U.S. athletes have run faster than Centrowitz’s mile PR of 3:49.26.

But no American has ever been better on the world stage.

“Honestly, I love pressure,” Centrowitz said in an interview last month. “I’ve been dealing with it my entire life having a two-time Olympian as a father.”

Bernard Lagat won the 2007 World Championships 1,500 gold medal for the U.S. and claimed a Worlds bronze two years later. But Lagat had already competed for his native Kenya in two Olympic Games before changing his national allegiance. Before Lagat, the last U.S. runner to medal in a Worlds 1,500 was Jim Spivey in 1987.

No American has claimed an Olympic 1,500 medal since Ryun’s silver at the 1968 Mexico City Games.

Centrowitz, then just 21, took the bronze at the 2011 Worlds and might have won the gold or at least medaled a year later at the Olympic Games if injuries hadn’t hampered his build up in the months leading up to London. He moved up a step on the medal podium claiming the silver at the 2013 Worlds. The 2013 gold medalist, Kenya’s Asbel Kiprop, was banned in 2019 for four years for doping.

Before Centrowitz won the 2016 World Indoor 1,500 title an American hadn’t medaled in the competition’s 1,500 since 1995.

“He’s got the medals,” said Teare, an NCAA 5,000 champion for Oregon. “I think that’s one of the things that a lot of Americans have kind of missed out on is being able to get those medals and show up in big races and, you know, make a name for yourself.

“If I had a career that turned out like Centro’s, I’d think I’d be very, very happy.”

Because Centrowitz changed the narrative, young American middle and long distance runners like Teare now believe global medals are attainable, a notion that 15 years ago would have seemed absurd.

U.S. men won four of the six medals available between 800 and 3,000 meters at the World Indoor Championships in Glasgow last March, three more than all of Africa combined. Yared Nuguse ran the fifth fastest mile ever, 3:43.97, last September.

Centrowitz, Teare said, “set the precedent for all that.”

“I can remember that day he won in Rio,” said Adidas’ Joe Waskom, a two-time NCAA 1,500 champion at Washington where he was recruited by Centrowitz, then a Husky graduate assistant. “I remember sitting on the floor, eyes wide open, knowing that was a possibility.”

Just as Centrowitz charted a path for a new generation, he followed a trail blazed by Ryun and the Men of Oregon over parts of seven decades. His father Matt Centrowitz, was a star miler for Oregon in the 1970s, the longtime Pac-10 record-holder at 1,500 and later a five-time U.S. champion and American record-holder at 5,000 meters.

The younger Centrowitz has a tattoo across his upper chest – “Like Father Like Son.” Matt Centrowitz, a brash New York City native, said he appreciated the sentiment but his son could have just sent him a greeting card to tell him how he felt.

The elder Centrowitz was one of the closest runners to Bill Dellinger, the first great Oregon runner of the Bill Bowerman era, the 1964 Olympic bronze medalist at 5,000, and later the coach of more than 20 sub-4:00 milers, and the younger Centrowitz would also have a close relationship with Dellinger.

Dellinger’s victory in the 1954 NCAA mile would begin the Men of Oregon’s more than 60-year obsession with capturing the Olympic 1,500 gold medal. On a wet night in Rio, Centrowitz finally carried the torch across the Olympic finish line.

“There’s that U of O connection from Dellinger to Centrowitz winning the gold medal,” Wilborn said.

It wasn’t just in Oregon where Centrowitz’s Olympic win provided closure.

Ryun held the mile world record for nine years, the 1,500 global standard for seven. But he was denied the gold in three Olympic appearances. He was struck by illness at the Tokyo Games in 1964, eliminated in the heats at 17. Four years later, Ryun lost to altitude-raised Kip Keino of Kenya in the thin air of Mexico City. Ryun was tripped in his first round heat in 1972 Olympics in Munich and failed to advance.

On the afternoon of the 2016 Olympic final, Centrowitz checked his email after waking up from his pre-race nap.

“I woke up and I had an email and I had to do a double take because not many guys spell their name ‘Ryun’ with a u,” Centrowitz said. “I’m not sure how he even got my email.”

In the email Jim and Anne Ryun wished Centrowitz luck in the 1,500 later that night and said they were praying for him.

They also included a Bible verse–II Corinthians 2:14

“But thanks be to God, who always leads us as captives in Christ’s triumphal procession and uses us to spread the aroma of knowledge of him everywhere.”

“I read it,” Centrowitz said. “And then I re-read it and re-read it again before the final.”

“We still talk about the way in which he won that race,” Anne Ryun said.

And they will continue to talk about it in Eugene and Alameda and Ann Arbor and Snoqualmie, wherever skinny kids, some of them now world class milers in their own right, chase him, around tracks and down trails, through the imaginations he opened to a new world of possibilities.