COLE HOCKER’S BEAUTIFUL DARK TWISTED FANTASY

Serve, flex, I do work 

Six, I’m like Mike 

He’s out of sight 

THE FIRST TIME Kanye speaks on “Praise God,” he compares himself to Michael Jordan, referencing his six championships with the Bulls. Kanye constantly invokes the attitude of a champion. But I don’t think he’s ever won anything. To Kanye, I think winning is about cultivating a celebrity that is unstoppable—a popularity that’s never vulnerable. To Kanye, fame is the most supreme form of victory. So maybe he’s always winning. 

That’s where Cole’s adoration of Kanye comes from: an ambition that’s so pure and incorruptible because it stems from an unwavering trust in himself and his abilities. Kanye believes in himself, and that’s all he needs. Cole’s attitude aligns. He channels that same energy. The Kanye attitude is about thinking you can do anything. “It’s about setting extreme goals, not safe goals,” Cole says.

In August 2020, Cole got COVID. He was sick and out of shape. He was 19 and had never competed in an outdoor collegiate season. He’d broken 4 minutes in the mile one time. But he wrote down that he wanted to make the Olympics less than a year later. He didn’t tell anybody. It was an exercise just for himself. And truthfully, that kind of thinking feels deranged, but Cole knew he could do it—even when the rest of us didn’t. 

“It’s daunting to write down a goal like that. It’s scary to set a goal so ambitious because you’re afraid to fail. There’s a big chance that you’ll fail,” Cole says. “But now I’ve learned it’s not going to hurt me to set my sights at the very top. Like why didn’t I make my goal to win a gold medal?”

Cole’s learned his lesson. He doesn’t want to stifle his potential by limiting his expectations for himself. “I want to win Worlds,” he says. “And continue to win every race that I’m entered in.”

Kanye understands the profound effect that his music can have on his fans. “Go listen to all my music. It’s the code to self esteem,” Kanye said in an interview with BBC. “If you’re a Kanye West fan, you’re not a fan of me. You’re a fan of yourself.”

I wonder if he knows it helped some kid from Indiana become an Olympian. 

“I got to be a little director,” Cole says. The video is a compilation of race clips from his younger years spliced between a broken-up long shot of him running, zoomed in on his feet, zoomed in on his Nikes. 

“The main thing is that I wanted to show my progress through the sport,” Cole says. The earliest of the clips is from 9 and 10-year-old age group nationals for cross country. The shot of his Nikes colliding with the concrete, though, comes from the week he made his decision. It depicts running in its most fundamental form: always moving forward, always one step at a time. 

The song is “Praise God.” It’s off of Donda. It’s a masterpiece. Cole told me, “I thought that Kanye snippet was fire the first time I heard it.” The song is thoughtful and complex but straightforward, not cryptic. It’s dramatic but not overdone. It’s a simultaneous look into Kanye’s past and future; he grieves his mother’s death but keeps his eyes locked in on what’s ahead of him. 

The song, and Cole’s video, opens with a poetry recitation: Kanye’s late mother Donda West, who was an English professor, recites Gwendolyn Brooks’s famous poem, “Speech to the Young: Speech to the Progress-Toward.” 

It’s like the poem was written for Cole. He is The Young. He is the Progress-Toward. He’s 20, and he’s already done things no other American 1500 meter runner ever has. And he’s still just getting started.

Say to them, say to the down-keepers, the sun-slappers,

The self-soilers, the harmony-hushers

DOES ANYBODY REMEMBER the Shhh? It happened across the finish line at the Olympic Trials, when Cole beat the reigning Olympic champion. Cole’s flashy victory celebration was a gesture toward the haters, a statement to the people who thought he couldn’t do it. It’s not like he has serious haters; nobody is out to get him, nobody despises him. He hasn’t done anything to deserve that treatment. But a lot of people didn’t think he could stay at the top of his game from February to July. But Cole knew he could. The Shhh was directed toward the people who don’t understand Cole’s talent the same way he does.

Cole ran 3:50 in the mile in February. That had never been done before by a collegian. He won both the mile and 3,000 at indoor NCAAs within an hour. Cole was killing it, and people would comment subtle backhanded compliments on celebratory Instagram posts like, “Pretty good, but I wonder if he can hold this into the summer.” Anything short of sheer amazement felt unwarranted. 

“You search up your name and read what people say,” Cole says. “You shouldn’t do that obviously, but it’s unrealistic because you want to see praise too. I’ll see like 10 positive tweets and then one that’s like ‘Shitty finishing form,’ and I’ll think about that one the most.”

The Trials is when Cole finally convinced them of what he already knew: He can do anything. Like Brooks’s poem, Cole’s video tells the people who doubted him, this is for you. 

Even if you are not ready for the day, it cannot always be night



IT’S ABOUT PERFORMING when it counts. Cole seems to always perform when it counts. You watch him step onto the track at Hayward Field and you understand confidence differently. Every time he toes the line, he believes he can win, and it shows; his demeanor is like he’s holding a winning hand of cards, like he’s waiting for the moment he can lay them out on the table for everybody to see. 

You have to disappear into the night to prepare for The Day. Everybody knows that. What a lot of distance runners don’t know, though, is that the night can’t last forever. They love the night; whether it’s because they crave the routine that our sport necessitates or they fear the exposure of race day, they’re somehow uniquely skilled in obsessing over their training, meticulously optimizing their bodies for performance. But none of that matters if they can’t execute on The Day. Greatness doesn’t happen in the night, and Cole knows that. Greatness only happens on The Day, only when everybody is watching.

It’s not easy. Pressure can be crippling. “I’ve been running since fifth grade and I’m still nervous on race day,” Cole says. “It’s always the same. I can’t sit still. That’s not going to change, even in 10 years.”

It’s difficult to abandon your doubts and, even just for a few minutes, tap into the potential that’s buried somewhere deep within us. Maybe it’s easier when you have somebody like Kanye constantly in your ears, showing you how simple it can be to sincerely believe you’re the shit, that you can do anything you set your mind to. 

“Everyone who’s ever been a runner knows that there are times when your mind is trying to convince you that you can’t do it,” Cole says. “But you have to anticipate nerves. That’s the only thing you can really control. You have to train yourself to remember what you’ve been working for.” 

Then the beat drops. The Nike swoosh flashes across the screen. A choir of gospel singers pours in. Cole’s signature appears. Kanye comes in full-force: cocky, unafraid of being explicit about his ambition. 

In September, Cole announced on Instagram that he’d decided to go pro and that he’d run for Nike. His stock was high, and they made an offer that was hard to pass up. Of course, Cole’s announcement video was laid over a Kanye song.

It would’ve been easy to make a highlight reel or an obnoxious graphic design like a 5-star basketball recruit, but instead Cole chose to veer toward artistic, symbolic.