Nicholas Thompson and Malcolm Gladwell will be chatting about track and field throughout the Olympics. You can read their first exchange, about the five thousand metres, their second exchange, about doping, and their third, about underdogs and the Jamaican sprinters.

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Nicholas Thompson: So, Malcolm, you’re half-British and half-Jamaican and you love running. You must be enjoying these Olympics?

Malcolm Gladwell: Let’s not forget Canadian. I like to switch among all three nationalities, depending on who is up or down. (I’m only partially kidding.) On Saturday night, when England had its greatest evening ever on the track, I was absolutely British.

N: Today, after Leo Manzano won a silver in the fifteen hundred metres, I’m pleased to be an American. I’ll also add that, as the grandson of a Cold War arms negotiator, I particularly enjoy watching the United States beat the Russians. So, thank you, Gabby Douglas and Serena Williams.

Another guy enjoying the Olympics is Alberto Salazar, an American of Cuban descent whose father was, at one time, a close compatriot of Castro’s. Salazar’s protégés, Mo Farah and Galen Rupp, crushed the field in the ten thousand metres. I know I’ve said a few critical things about Rupp in this conversation. He doesn’t always act exactly the way I want athletic icons to act, and I still want Lagat to beat him in the five thousand. But I was rooting for him hard once the race began. This was the first 10-k that Kenenisa Bekele has ever finished and lost. It was hard not to think that one thing Salazar has done for Rupp is to give him the confidence that Americans can actually win big races, and that the races aren’t, as you said, “owned” by another country; Salazar is, after all, one of the last Americans who actually won major races.

M: The best analogy, I think, is the way that Andy Murray has started to play better since Ivan Lendl became his coach. It is not the case that ex-athletes make great coaches. In fact, sometimes the opposite is true.

N: Isiah Thomas.

M: But there are specific times and places where great young athletes seem to only take direction from someone at the same level. Salazar has a special kind of credibility because he is literally one of the last non-Africans, in living memory, to have held the title of world’s greatest distance runner. So he’s proof it can be done.

N: The mystifying thing about the race was why the East Africans kept slowing it down, most insanely when Geb Gebremariam pulled out in front with about six hundred metres to go. They know that Rupp and Farah have ferocious kicks. What were they thinking?

M: I didn’t understand that at all. In fact, I thought that Gebremariam and the Bekele brothers showed really appalling judgement. Back in May, Farah ran a 3:34 fifteen-hundred metres in California and then a 13:12 five thousand metres, an hour later. Both of those are world class times. And for a 10-k runner to casually toss off a fifteen hundred metre that fast, that early in the season, ought to have sent a clear message to the rest of the Olympic field. it didn’t. Were the Ethiopians just over-confident?

N: They also may have been worried about Bekele. He’s struggled this year, and maybe they thought their only chance was to turn it into an all-out sprint.

Speaking of self-confidence, my favorite post-race quote from Usain Bolt was this, about Johan Blake, “He works harder than me, but I knew what I needed to do and I have great talent.”

M: Here’s the thing. I never believe what athletes say when they discuss how hard they train. It’s in their interest to downplay their own efforts—and maximize everyone else’s. Remember years ago, when Sebastian Coe was the greatest middle-distance runner in the world? He was famous for workouts that were incredibly short: over in a hour. Turns out that was all nonsense. He was training as hard as everyone else.

N: Another Salazar runner is Matt Centrowitz, a fifteen-hundred-metre runner who came in fourth today. (Personally, I think he has a good chance of ending up with the bronze, since one of the runners who finished ahead of him was a Moroccan, and almost every accomplished Moroccan distance runner has been busted for doping in recent years.) You told me that he had never done fifty sit-ups before turning professional. How is that possible? His father was an Olympian, and surely must have trained his son somewhat as a kid.

M: Salazar told me that when I interviewed him for my New Yorker piece. He was clearly in awe of Centrowitz. Said he’d never met a runner that good who was so “undertrained.” Now—was he pulling a Sebastian Coe psych-out move on me? Maybe. But of all the young American hopefuls, Centrowitz is the one who makes me the most excited. He’s such a natural competitor. And what if Salazar is telling the truth? What happens when Centro starts to do “real” workouts?

N: Well, as long as he doesn’t do too many sit-ups. Probably the most talented American miler in the last two decades, Alan Webb, worked relentlessly to get stronger and talked often of how many push-ups he could do. And he just disappeared into oblivion.

M: Webb is a tragedy. I thought he was the best American miler since Jim Ryun. (Ouch: that really dates me, doesn’t it?) But it seems like every time I caught up with Webb he was switching coaches. He was with Salazar for a while, then switched. He dropped—and then reinstated—his high-school coach, and on and on. That’s not a good sign. And yes. He got too strong. There is no reason for a miler to be able to do lots of push-ups. The weight of extraneous muscle is not your friend. The one thing that I think non-runners understand least about élite runners, by the way, is how absurdly skinny they are. I’m five-nine, a hundred and twenty-eight, and when I met Rupp and Farah back in May I felt like I could have taken them both on in a bar fight.