Usain Bolt, of Jamaica, wins the men’s hundred-metre final, ahead of Justin Gatlin, at the Rio Olympics. Photograph by Ian Walton / Getty

During the Rio Olympics, Malcolm Gladwell and Nicholas Thompson will be discussing the track-and-field events. Part one, on Caster Semenya and Olympic economics, can be read here__.

Nicholas Thompson: Welcome back! I imagine that, as a part-British, part-Jamaican national, you’re probably in a good mood. (And you’re from Canada, too, which got a bronze in the men’s hundred metres.)

Malcolm Gladwell: A big day for my peoples! I know—or, rather, I hope—that we will return in much more detail to the question of Jamaican dominance. But can I just repeat—for the millionth time—the fact that this is a country of 2.7 million people? On Saturday night, I watched the swimming four-by-one-hundred-metre medley relays, where both the American women and men won the gold—beating countries like the U.K., Australia, and, wait for it, Denmark, population 5.6 million. In both cases, there were post-race interviews, with the winning Americans bubbling over about how wonderful they are. Fine. But just once—once—I would love for a winning U.S. relay-team member to be honest enough to say, in answer to the question of why they won: “Well, we’ve got about three hundred and fifteen million more people than the Danes, so that’s a pretty big advantage.” I’ve often thought, as a non-American, that the motto of the U.S. Olympic team should be “Excellence Without Humility.” So, let me repeat one more time, as we celebrate the magnificent wins of Jamaica’s Elaine Thompson in the women’s hundred metres and Usain Bolt in the men’s hundred metres, and as we await the sprint relays next weekend: Jamaica. Half the size of Denmark.

N.T.: Fair enough! I wouldn’t mind a little more humility from the U.S. swimmers. And the Jamaican sprinters are captivating; Elaine Thompson gets my vote for the best celebration so far. In fact, it’s hard not to appreciate the whole country’s devotion to track, which, as I understand it, may contribute to what social scientists call “The Jamaica Paradox,” referring to the country’s unusually long life expectancy for its relatively low income level.

M.G.: Jamaica reminds us, I think, that we have to stop using income as a proxy for all good things. I once read this wonderful (and somewhat whimsical) essay by a Jamaican literary scholar arguing that one of the reasons that Jamaica does so well at running is that it has no snakes (yes, Jamaica is a hundred per cent snake-free), which means that children can run barefoot with impunity. I’m not sure how seriously to take that. But as a metaphor I think it speaks volumes. Jamaica is poor and, in places, violent and deeply dysfunctional. But it also comes pretty close, in a lot of ways, to paradise.

N.T.: Still, your comment about the swimmers reminded me of my favorite stat from these Olympics: Michael Phelps, population of one, from Baltimore, population six hundred and twenty thousand, has won more gold medals than all but about forty countries, in their entire history. He’s won more than India, more than Argentina, and, yes, more than Jamaica.

Now, this is slightly misleading. Obviously, the Olympics are biased toward swimmers. (If Usain Bolt could run four different styles, he might win eight medals each Olympics.) And it’s not to say that I think Michael Phelps is the greatest athlete ever. As an American, I’d gladly trade him and a first-round draft pick to Argentina for Lionel Messi. Still, as a friend of mine may have said in our last chat, the foundation of sports is “the voluntary acceptance of unnecessary obstacles.” And if we use medal counts as a metric then there’s no denying the relative brilliance of Michael Phelps, even if he, and some of his teammates, can be a little ungracious.

But before we drown in a debate about swimming, let’s move to the track, and the men’s ten thousand metres on Friday night. It was almost an exact repeat of last year’s World Championship. Did you know that Mo Farah was going to win one lap into the race, or did it take two?

M.G.: It was an honest race! What was the last five thousand—13:12? For those who aren’t rabid track fans, let me explain. The second half of Saturday night’s ten thousand was run at a pace that would have won the national championships in the five thousand metres in all but three or four countries in the world. I am old enough to remember when 13:12 was the world record for the five thousand metres!

They were flying. And, I think, if you had polled the top runners in the race beforehand, they would have agreed that that was the best way to beat Farah: with a long, hard, sustained second half. So what happened? He won anyway. It’s possible he’s unbeatable at this point.

N.T.: I disagree! None of the main contenders in that race has any chance of beating Farah in a five thousand. They’re relatively better at longer distances, and he’s relatively better at shorter distances; so the optimal strategy was to make the racing part of the race as long as possible. By taking it slowly for the first two or three miles, they essentially turned it into a five thousand, or maybe a seven thousand. The ideal strategy would have been to take it out hard from the very beginning. Running hard from the gun would have maximized Farah’s difficulty and it’s the best way to put yourself in a good position if something strange happens—like Farah falling, as happened Saturday night.

Now, it’s quite possible that my hard-from-lap-one strategy would have failed, too. The one man in the race who has defeated Farah recently—Geoffrey Kamworor, who beat him in a half marathon—had nothing Saturday night. He ran only a tiny bit slower in later miles of the 2015 New York City Marathon than he did in the first five thousand metres of this weekend’s race. And he still ran out of gas well before the finishing kicks.

M.G.: Hmmmm. Farah’s winning time was 27:05. Only four runners in the world ran faster than that last year—and most of those times were recorded in the highly-curated, élite “Diamond League” meets, where the runners are quietly and efficiently ushered through the early stages of the race by rabbits. And, by the way, all the runners who were beaten by Farah in those slightly faster races last year were beaten by him again in this year’s slightly slower version. I am reminded of what the famously laconic San Antonio Spurs coach Gregg Popovich often says, in answer to post-game questions about what his team needs to do to play better: “Make more shots.” We are basically at the point where the only productive advice we can give Farah’s opponents is to run faster than him.

N.T.: I think we really need to give credit to Farah’s coach, Alberto Salazar, for pioneering a new way of training, one that maximizes both strength (the ability to run a fast, smooth pace) and speed (the ability to run a blazing fast last quarter-mile). And for keeping Farah at his prime, mentally and physically, at every championship. The failure of Kamworor is a reminder of just how hard it is to peak at the right moment. I actually think this is an underappreciated element of Farah’s excellence. As anyone who has run competitively at any level knows, it is a sport in which you are constantly managing small injuries and aches and pains. Knowing when to rest, and when to train through that little ache in your quad, is a skill, and one at which Farah obviously excels.