Two-time World champion and three-time Olympic silver medalist Joe Kovacs will return to the ring at The Armory in New York City on February 1, 2026, headlining the shot put competition at the 118th edition of the Millrose Games.

This will be Kovacs’s fourth time competing at Millrose, having finished as runner-up in 2019, 2020 and 2023. Kovacs, the second-best shot putter in history, will pursue his first full indoor season as a pro this winter, with his sights set on competing at his first World Indoor Championships, to be held in Poland in March.

Kovacs will take on a field featuring four global medalists—Rajindra Campbell, Josh Awotunde, Roger Steen and Tripp Piperi—as well as African record holder Chuk Enekwechi.

Kovacs sat down with CITIUS MAG to discuss his goals for the indoor season, takeaways from 2025, and what training looks like as he turns 37 in June. The following interview has been edited lightly for clarity:

CITIUS MAG: We’re coming up on 2026, and you’re turning 37 this year. How’s the offseason going for you?

Joe Kovacs: So far, so good. We’ve just taken time to regroup, getting a lot of things done that during the season you have to push away. Lots of family stuff, lots of time with the kids, and then we’re also doing some camps. Keeping busy just trying to give back and keep the sport going in the right direction.

Obviously having twins now is such a huge factor in that, but how does an offseason for you look different training-wise than it did 10 years ago?

10 years ago, I was young, single and living at the Olympic Training Center at the time. You could make a lot of selfish decisions that are best for your training. All these years later, with no regrets about it, but you have a wife and a family and there’s a lot of other obligations. I think it’s just getting good at time management.

I always tell people I was always thinking about lifting all day and getting my mindset right and all these things I do. Now I transition from playing a game with my kids or talking about Lightning McQueen, putting them down for a nap and five minutes later I’m chalking my neck and going to practice. I’m getting good at the transition times and being able to flip the switch sooner than I thought.

What are the things you’ve found in the last couple years that are most important in the offseason for recovery and making sure you can stay in shape as you start to get older?

Especially at my size, being strong helps. Weak things break. I’ve never had any major injury in my career and I think, as I get older, I can attribute that to my strength. I think there’s some things I can get away without doing anymore, but at the same time that just makes me more injury prone to have a problem. I’m really just trying to be diligent and make sure I’m fortified from head to toe so when we get to the season, we can really go after it.

I talked to Payton [Otterdahl] a couple weeks ago and he said that in the early parts of the offseason, he really focuses on plyometrics and building athleticism. Is there anything in the offseason that you do that is kind of reserved for the offseason and you don’t into in-season training?

For sure, it’s your general fitness preparation time of the year. That’s like sled pushes, things that wear you down. Payton’s doing more plyos, I’d be doing something more like a sled push and the odds and ends, things that we don’t normally have time to do in the season. That’s definitely the time of year that you try to get all that stuff in you can, because some of that stuff would just wear you down and make you tired if you did it too often. In the season, it takes the precision and the sting off the big throws, so we try to make up for it in the offseason.

Payton said he started gymnastics this fall. When’s the last time you got on the high bar?

It hasn’t been since I was at the Olympic Training Center that I got a high bar that I trusted. It’s probably still like riding a bike, I could definitely still do a giant if I knew I trusted the bar. It’s always fun when you see a 350-pound guy going upside down on the bar. It’s been a while since I’ve done anything crazy like that, but I’d like to think I can still get on there and do it.

That video is still one of my favorites, it does not feel real the first couple times you watch it.

I’m always mad because we never took the videos of the times we actually cleaned it up and made it look better. That was the first time I got over, and then luckily I had my javelin friends who are good gymnasts, they taught me how to make it better.

The reason we’re here is to announce that you’re competing at Millrose again this year coming up in February. You’ve been runner-up there three times, how excited are you to get back to competing at The Armory?

I’m excited to get back there. To be honest, I’ve never really tried to do an indoor season as a pro except I’d go to Millrose just because I thought it was a fun thing to do. But I think this year I’m actually going to try doing an indoor season. What I’ve done in the past has been maybe not bad, but it hasn’t been anything that would be memorable. This year, I’m gonna try and throw pretty far indoors, so I’ll be going in there with a different mindset of, of course trying to win it, but at the same time trying to throw pretty darn far, especially to start the season.

What went into that decision to pursue a full indoor season this year? Like you said, World Indoors is something you’ve never done, and you haven’t even competed indoors since 2023.

Yeah, and I’ve never thrown in Europe, how they throw inside the nets and on the pads. I’ve never done it, and it’s my 14th year as a pro, so I think that’s kind of why we’re thinking, “why not?” Especially this year that there’s no outdoor champs, pissed away the last year when things popped up, I just feel like why not do it? It’s not gonna hurt, I think it could be fun to do a little bit.

One of the reasons I never really did it is because, luckily, I never felt like I had to. If you don’t have a medal or you don’t have something, indoors is a great thing to do. Luckily, early in my career I started with a medal outdoors and I always viewed this as if it’s going to help or hurt me, and I never really thought it was going to help me. But I think at this point in my career, I’m excited to do something which is something I’ve never done.

At Millrose, we throw the plastic ball, but I’ll be very excited after Millrose when we go back to throwing the steel ball the rest of the season, because that’s what they do in Europe.

Well I’m excited to not have to wait until late May to watch you throw. The world indoor record is Ryan Crouser’s 22.82m from 2021. Just with the point in the season indoors is at, do you see a world where we see a 23m throw indoors? Or does it just not really line up with typical training schedules to make that a realistic possibility?

I think it has nothing to do with training, it has to do with incentives. I would like to throw 23m. I think I can probably break that record indoors this season, that’d be a good goal of mine, especially because I have a bunch of throws from the outdoor season farther than that. Of course I’m thinking about that in my head.

I think people try to think that the indoor season has some kind of disadvantage, like the ball. Honestly it’s the incentives. If you looked at the people like myself who do have a contract, I never really see or have heard of people who were incentivized to do the indoor season. I think that’s why you don’t see the depth and the crazy throws more so that the time of year. If somebody put a circle on your calendar and said to throw super far on this date and it’s in the indoor season, I think you could see something crazy like you see at U.S. Champs and stuff like that where everybody’s over 22m.

When you look ahead to 2026, you have World Indoors on your schedule as a clear goal for indoors. The outdoor season is really open with no global championships at the end of it, unfortunately. How are you and Ashley approaching goal-setting for the outdoor season?

You just look at the next tier down of where’s the biggest payday and work your way back. I’ve always, maybe to a fault, viewed what I do as a profession more than a passion sometimes, so I’m always looking at it as a business and trying to be ready for the days that are the ones you get paid at and can check boxes. Those are the ones I’m really trying to get better at, and this year it’s gonna be the Diamond League.

We’re not gonna be at the Ultimate Championships. There’s rumors that that might switch, I don’t think it will but I’d hope it would. Just kind of working with it backwards, being able to try some things out in the season that doesn’t matter in terms of the World Championships.

We’ll also be hosting a lot of stuff here in Columbus with our new throws facility and our camps, so I think we’ll probably integrate that all together. It’s a good experiment year to do it because of course you don’t want to do it on a year with a World Champs or a big payday like the Olympics as well.

As we’re doing this interview, you and Ashley are on your way home from one of your camps. It’s not transitioning because you’re still competing at a really high level, but what has adding that coaching aspect of your career done for you?

Ashley was a collegiate coach for 12 years and we’re so used to that collegiate routine. When she stepped away from it, we don’t miss having to call people and recruit and go to the football games, but she certainly misses coaching. She still has me, she still has some professional athletes she helps, but I think we started doing these camps and that kind of filled that void. Now we have some people looking to move here, come train with us at our facility that’s just about to be done. We’re excited to have a little club and environment, a little elite group of people around us, as well as helping out the high school athletes and coaches.

It’s a humbling point to give back. I always tell them at my camps that I didn’t really take the shot put seriously until my sophomore year of high school. I went to a camp and I’m following around this guy who they said was really good, he had these giant calves, and then he told me that I needed to do the spin and not the glide because I was too short. That guy’s name was Reese Hoffa. I did what he said, and looking years later, all those little things he said at that camp were maybe little moments that gave me a different perspective and excitement to keep training in a different way. It was really special for me when Reese was ending his career, I was starting mine at the same point. I don’t know if I hadn’t had that moment with him at that high school camp if I would’ve been at that stage as a professional, and I kind of get to be in that same setting now.

You said that you “pissed away” your 2025 season. The result at USAs wasn’t what you wanted, but you still won a Diamond League title and put some really far marks out there. Are there any positives you took away from your 2025 season?

I’m probably pissed just because of that streak I had of always medaling and it’s annoying to have that end, especially, how I look at it, for no reason. It was not the most impressive World Champs so I’m pretty sure if I was there, that streak would have continued. It’s annoying to have that happen, but that’s sport, you’ve got to learn from it. There’s a reason I wasn't ready, and that’s not really an excuse, but it just reminds me that U.S. Champs is more important than anything else, no matter what. I’ve just got to make sure that I’m protecting that day even more.

Thanks for your time today Joe, and I think I speak for a lot of people when I say we’re very excited to see you at Millrose and on the indoor circuit this year.

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Tickets to the 118th Millrose Games are on sale now at MillroseGames.org.