In case you haven’t been paying attention the last month and a half, the men’s 800m is broken. 1:41s are being dropped all around, 1:42s don’t mean a ton anymore, and 1:43s would be lucky to land you in the top six. This brokenness reached its crescendo with the Olympic final in Paris last night. Emmanuel Wanyonyi took home gold in 1:41.19, making him the third-fastest man in history and just a few hundredths-of-a-second behind Wilson Kipketer for that second spot. Marco Arop shaved nearly two seconds off his PB to take silver, just .01 seconds behind Wanyonyi, and Algeria’s Djamel Sedjati, who looked indestructible throughout this 800m resurgence in the last few weeks, found himself finishing with the bronze.

Here’s what you need to know:

- Wanyonyi went straight to the front of the pack and took the race out slightly slower than what we’ve seen from some of the recent Diamond League races with pacers, coming through the first lap in 50.3. As was to be expected, Sedjati sat at the back of the pack, but so too did Arop. This was a distinct change from Arop’s usual front running tactics. The shift makes sense, though, when looking at how leading the pack backfired for him in Monaco, where he was in first at the 700m mark and ended up in sixth.

- Sedjati and Arop began to move up in the field on the back straight while Wanyonyi was fending off an attempt at the lead by Frenchman Gabriel Tual. World Indoor champion Bryce Hoppel was also in a great spot coming into the final turn.

- Tual started fading once the leaders reached the home straight. Wanyonyi had the lead by a few meters, but Arop seemed to be closing that gap fast. If this race was 802m, Arop might’ve had enough room to get ahead of Wanyonyi, but the 20-year-old Kenyan had just enough strength left to hold off the reigning World champion from Canada and deny him gold by .01 seconds.

- Sedjati’s final 150m, which had been absolutely unparalleled this season regardless of the pace of the race, just didn’t have enough juice tonight to catch the two men at the front, but a bronze in 1:41.50 isn’t a bad consolation prize.

By the numbers:

- 1:41.19 is the fifth-fastest performance ever. Wanyonyi, who just turned 20 last week, is also younger now than either David Rudisha (who owns the three fastest times ever) or Kipketer were when they ran their respective times. Coincidentally, he’s also the youngest ever Olympic champion in the men’s 800m. This gold makes it five straight for Kenya in this event, and they have collected eight of the 15 medals handed out for the 800m across the last five Games.

- Arop set a new NACAC area record with his clocking of 1:41.20. He took over a second off the mark that was previously held by Donovan Brazier. Arop has now run exactly two seconds faster than any other Canadian man in history. The margin between first and second, which came down to one solitary hundredth-of-a-second, is the slimmest in Olympic history.

- This was the first race in history to ever have four men under 1:42. It had the fastest second-, third-, fourth-, sixth-, and seventh-place finishers ever, and equalled the time for the fastest fifth-place finisher ever. By average time of the top eight finishers (in this race there were only eight competitors), this is the fastest race in history. That title had been held for nearly 12 years by the London Olympic final until the Paris Diamond League snatched it away in July, and now this race, with an average top eight finish of 1:42.06, takes the top spot by a significant margin.

- There have been 24 sub-1:42 performances in history. Four of them came in this race, and nine of them have come this year. This all comes after not seeing one for almost five years at the time that Sedjati first crossed the line in 1:41.56 in the Paris Diamond League. I think the most impressive stat to come from examining these 24 races is that Rudisha is responsible for a whopping seven of them. Wanyonyi and Sedjati now have three apiece.

- Poor Bryce Hoppel. He came to Stade De France tonight and ran the 16th-fastest time in history, a time that would have won every Olympic or World Championship final except London 2012, where Rudisha set the world record, and this one. Where he finished an agonizing fourth, despite shattering the American record and dropping just over a second off his PB.

Full results:

1. Emmanuel Wanyonyi - 1:41.19

2. Marco Arop - 1:41.20 AR

3. Djamel Sedjati - 1:41.50

4. Bryce Hoppel - 1:41.67 NR

5. Mohamed Attaoui - 1:42.08

6. Gabriel Tual - 1:42.14

7. Tshepiso Masalela - 1:42.82

8. Max Burgin - 1:43.84

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