The 2024 Olympic Games are done. They’re over. Gold medals have been draped around necks, national anthems played, dreams realized/deferred (dried up in the sun, etc.), and statuses established, cemented, and/or called into question. It was a lot. You’re excused if you’ve found yourself nursing a bit of a track and field hangover from the whole shebang. In an ideal world, governed by an ideal calendar, the track and field “regular season” would precede the big global championship each year. But that’s not the world we live in. Instead what we get is a regular season that weirdly straddles the big global championship.

Fortunately for sports fans who appreciate a non-linear narrative arc to a season, the Diamond League is back and ramping up toward its own, unrelated conclusion. Tomorrow in Lausanne, Switzerland, track and field fans will be treated to a high-quality meet featuring all your favorite pros. And, somewhat confusingly, there’s not even a whole week before the next big showdown in Silesia, Poland, on Sunday.

And while tuning into a non-Olympic track meet while there’s still all kinds of Paris content on your feed can feel like a sort of hollow ritual, it really doesn’t have to be. There’s still plenty of reasons to fire up the ol’ Peacock app on your Roku (at least for the rest of 2024…).

First, there’s the obvious reason: it’s track and field, and as a reader of a track and field newsletter, you presumably like to watch it. Go ahead and tune in for two hours – you’re going to have a nice time! The Diamond League isn’t perfect, but packing a high quality program into an easily digestible television window is its biggest selling point.

But the real draw is the potential to witness a statement performance. None of the standalone results in Lausanne are likely to be career-defining, unless someone channels their Olympic-peak fitness into a world record in Switzerland – unlikely, but not impossible with reigning world record holder Yaroslava Mahuchikh in the high jump and Grant Holloway perpetually hundredths away from history in the hurdles. More likely is someone using Lausanne for one of two purposes: to prove their Olympic success wasn’t a fluke, or to prove their Olympic failure was.

Take the men’s 1500m for instance. A gold medalist returning to the oval office, an enormous target on their back, can really shore up their legacy by dispatching of all challengers. If you’re Cole Hocker, you’re looking to take down Jakob Ingebrigtsen for the second straight race. In a paced setup – where Ingebrigtsen himself isn’t the de facto pacer – can Hocker still pull it off? Hocker’s kick is already legendary. But now he’s entering races with a 3:27 already under his belt.

If you’re Ingebrigtsen, well… proving the doubters wrong is more of a challenge as you already have a reputation as somebody who performs best in rabbited Diamond League races – but you surely don’t to want to rack up a second L. And the best revenge available is to move even further up the all-time list, where Ingebrigtsen currently sits at #4. Then there’s somebody like Hobbs Kessler. Nobody’s saying Kessler was an undeserving fifth-place finisher in Paris, but he’s only got one sub-3:30 1500m to his name, and sticking close on the leaders here will help demonstrate he’s ascended into international medal contention for good.

The men’s 1500m is full of intriguing plotlines, but it’s hardly the exception in a meet stacked top to bottom with talent fresh from Paris in search of a narrative-defining performance.