The last lap is won by whoever kept their contact time

In a tactical five thousand the finishing kick is rarely a fresh gear; it is the runner whose ground contact never lengthened.

Slow first three kilometres, everyone bunched, and then the pace drops off a cliff with a lap and a half left while four athletes suddenly look like they are running a different race from the rest of the field. The commentary calls it a kick, which implies a reserve being spent. Some of it is. Most of it is subtraction.

Here is what I mean. Over a long tactical race the runners who eventually fall away have not run out of anything dramatic. Their ground contact time has crept up, a few thousandths a lap, because the calf and the foot are losing the ability to return energy on landing and the leg spends longer absorbing before it can push. Slightly longer on the ground, slightly lower frequency, slightly more muscular work for the same speed. It compounds quietly for eight laps. Then the pace lifts, and that runner needs a bigger change in output than the fresh-looking athlete beside them to produce the same acceleration.

So the kick is partly a fiction. The athlete who wins the last lap is often the one who arrived at it having done the previous eleven a little more cheaply, and cheapness here is mostly a stiffness property of the lower leg rather than a cardiovascular one.

This annoys people because it moves the finishing kick out of the heroic register and into the boring one. It also has practical consequences. If your athlete keeps getting outsprinted off a slow pace, the reflex is to prescribe more repetition 400s and more anaerobic capacity. That may be the wrong winter entirely. If contact time is the thing degrading, the answer is durability of the lower leg and enough easy volume to make race pace metabolically dull, so nothing about the first three kilometres taxes them.

There is a fair objection. Some athletes are simply faster, have more fibre available at the top end, and would win the sprint regardless of how tired they were. True. But those athletes are obvious, and most fields do not contain one.

Everyone else is fighting over a decay curve. The runner who decays slowest looks like the runner with the best finish, and gets praised for a quality they may not actually have.