Flick on tomorrow night’s Prefontaine Classic for the prestigious Bowerman Mile and while all the talk will be of the latest instalment of the burgeoning rivalry between Jakob Ingebrigtsen and Timothy Cheruiyot, Olympic and world champions, respectively, the man likely to spend just as much time on your TV screen is Erik Sowinski.
If you have watched any of this season’s Diamond League there is a fair chance you will have spotted the American, who has been a busy man, the pacemaker for all four men’s middle-distance races run across the first two meetings, tearing round on the front end of fields in Doha and Birmingham, having established a reputation as the sport’s latest great human metronome.
“I’ve had a lot more requests this year than I’m able to fulfil,” he tells Standard Sport, having rather stumbled into what is effectively a career within a career since filling in at short notice at the Gateshead Diamond League last year.
As an individual athlete - one who runs all the way to the line - the 32-year-old has enjoyed a magnificent career, with a personal best of 1:44.58 for 800m, numerous USA vests and a world indoor bronze medal to his name. Remarkably, he has broken the 1:50 barrier for the two-lap distance on 200 occasions and believes that level of consistency is the key to his success as a pacer.
“No matter where I was racing in the world, no matter who I was racing, I was always going to put myself in the race and be competitive,” he says. “[Race directors] want someone who, regardless of the conditions and what-not, they can rely on.”
Typically, athletes and coaches will meet prior to a race to decide what pace to request from their rabbit, though there is no guarantee they then follow it and Sowinski is often forced to think on the fly.
“If I’m 70m ahead in a 1500m that doesn’t do anyone any good,” he says, though equally athletes occasionally get “antsy” if the prescribed pace feels too slow.
“You get this reputation where it’s expected to be perfect and it’s not going to be every time,” he adds, though more often than not, it has been this term.
Despite his status as the go-to man for the sport’s elite circuit, however, things have not been straightforward for Sowinski in recent years, dropped from his long-term contract with Nike back in 2019 and then also let go by Brooks 12 months later. “Running is a tough sport when you don’t have a contract and financial backing,” he says.
Pacemaking has provided a lifeline. Athletes have been reported to earn somewhere around $2,000 for pacing Diamond League races, as well as having their travel and accommodation costs covered. Sowinski, understandably, does not go into the specifics of his own wage, but while acknowledging the money in itself is “not bad”, he explains that as a primary source of income - rather than a supplement to a professional deal - it hardly makes for a lucrative existence, only just sustaining his own personal ambitions.
“If I could have a small shoe contract on top of doing this then I would be in a good spot where I didn’t feel like I needed to do anything else,” he says. “Here in the States, though, at a lot of these meets I have to pay my own way - I’m paying for my flight, my hotel - so I’m forking out $1,500 to go and do a race but it’s something I need to do.
“A thing a lot of people don’t know is that for these races you pace, you don’t see the money for four, six months. You have to wait for all the drug testing to go through for the athletes and everything. When you don’t have a shoe contract and money you have coming in quarterly, it gets a bit trickier trying to gauge finances. I’ve had times where I’ve paced a race and it’s nine or ten months down the road and I still haven’t seen that money.”
Pacemaking, he says, may prolong his career once he is no longer able to compete with the best over 800m, and he does not fear being made redundant by new wavelight technology, which he calls “awesome”.
If “How much do you get paid?” is the question Sowinski is asked most often then “Why don’t you just keep running?” must be a close second. “There’ve been a couple of 800m where I’ve been very tempted to,” he says. “If I was to ever do that I’d probably have to win or it would look really bad.”
This season, the temptation has not been quite the same, since in both Birmingham and Doha he has been swiftly back on track soon after the 800m to pace the 1500m as well.
“It’s reminded me of my college days, when I would run an 800m and then run the 4x400m,” he says. “It’s pretty ideal if it’s 30 or 45 minutes between races, that just feels like a workout to me.”
With no men’s 800m on the card at Hayward Field on Saturday, Sowinski is set for a relatively light shift, all his efforts focused on leading out a quick mile, having paced Ingebrigtsen to his 1500m indoor world record earlier this year.
For all the financial importance of such gigs, Sowinski says helping athletes run fast times remains his main motivation; Ingebritsen will soon have Hicham El Guerrouj’s outdoor world record in his sights, perhaps in Monaco this year, and Sowinski is desperate to the be the man leading the way when he does. But that - in an era of mass commercialisation and athlete-billboards - he may do so without a sponsor’s brand across his chest or on his spikes defies logic.
“I think I provide a lot of value as far TV time goes, but so far I’ve been unsuccessful in my endeavours,” he says. “The pacing money has been good but, man, a small shoe contract on top of that and not having to worry about anything else would just be awesome.”
