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Los Angeles Times
6 days ago
- Sport
- Los Angeles Times
‘Most impressive athletic feat ever': 16-year-old Texan sets world record in 800 meters
Ridgemont High, give way to a suburban school near Fort Worth. That's where the fast times will be this year. Cooper Lutkenhaus, an incoming junior at Northwest High School in Justin, Texas, was so impressive in setting an age-group world record at the U.S. Track & Field Championships on Sunday that a respected distance running coach and author declared it was 'the most impressive athletic feat in history.' In a social media post, Steve Magness, who wrote 'The Science of Running,' said Lutkenhaus' performance that included passing three of the nation's fastest men in an electrifying stretch run 'makes high school LeBron look like nobody. 'Cooper Lutkenhaus, take a bow.' Current Lakers star LeBron James, of course, was a prodigy on the basketball court at St. Vincent–St. Mary High School in Akron, Ohio, and went straight to the NBA upon graduating in 2003. Lutkenhaus, 16, won't be in school for long, either. He will become the youngest American to compete in the World Athletics Championships when he travels to Tokyo on Sept. 13-21. This time he'll have no age-group restriction, not after posting the fourth-best time in U.S. history (1:42.27) and nearly catching 800-meter champion Donavan Brazier (1:42.16). In the waning seconds, Lutkenhaus turned on the jets, going from seventh to second place while passing reigning indoor 800 meter world champion Josh Hoey as well as Olympians Brandon Miller and Bryce Hoppel, all of whom were clustered with Brazier at the front. Lutkenhaus' time was the fastest ever for a runner under 18. 'I saw someone coming up and I was like, 'Dang, this could be the high schooler,' ' Brazier told reporters. 'This kid's phenomenal. I'm glad that I'm 28 and maybe have a few more years left in me, hopefully won't have to deal with him in his prime because that dude is definitely special.' Does wunderkind describe Lutkenhaus? He's only been running track for three years, and he said his strategy of accelerating over the last quarter of the race was crafted in middle school. 'I've always kind of had a natural spot with 200 [meters] to go,' Lutkenhaus told reporters. 'Ever since middle school that's kind of been the spot I've really pushed from. Kind of just decided to go back to middle school tactics with 200 to go and really just give everything I had left.' Less surprising was a late surge by Noah Lyles in the 200 meters that enabled him to pass Kenny Bednarek en route to a world-leading time of 19.63. Lyles might have challenged his personal best American record of 19.31, but as he passed Bednarek with five meters remaining he turned his head and stared down his competitor. Bednarek retaliated, giving Lyles a shove before they shook hands. Afterward, Bednarek shrugged and chalked up the incident to 'Noah is gonna be Noah.' 'If he wants to stare me down, that's fine,' Bednarek said. 'I'm very confident I can beat him. What he said doesn't matter. It's just what he did. It's unsportsmanlike [crap] and I don't deal with that.' More drama occurred before championships when Sha'Carri Richardson was arrested and charged with fourth-degree domestic violence a week ago at the Seattle-Tacoma International Airport, according to a police report. The reigning 100-meter world champion was charged with assaulting her boyfriend, sprinter Christian Coleman, as the couple were going through security. A police officer reviewed camera footage and observed Richardson grab Coleman's backpack and yank it away, the report said. Coleman tried to step around Richardson and she pushed him into a wall. Later she appeared to throw headphones at him. In the report, however, the officer indicated that Colemen 'did not want to participate any further in the investigation and declined to be a victim.' Coleman defended Richardson when asked about the incident at the championships. 'She just has a lot of things going on, a lot of emotions and forces going on inside of her that not only I can't understand, but nobody can,' he said. 'Because she's one of one.… I know that it's been a tough journey for her this year. But she's going to bounce back. 'Like I said, I see it every day. She's the best female athlete in the world, and she's going to be just fine. She's going to be good. I'm going to be good, too.' Once the racing took place, attention turned to Lutkenhaus. His time bettered the the U18 world record — set by Timothy Kitum of Kenya at the 2012 London Olympics — by 1.1 seconds. 'It is the most mind blowing HS performance in history,' Magness wrote on X. 'Any high school phenom in history you can think of? This kid is better. I never thought we'd supplant Jim Ryun as the HS runner GOAT, but a sophomore in HS just did.'
The Guardian
03-03-2025
- Science
- The Guardian
‘Like landing on Mars': can a woman run a sub four-minute mile?
The day before Eliud Kipchoge's first attempt at a sub-two-hour marathon in 2017, a Nike vice-president described it to me as 'a moonshot'. Now, though, the track and field equivalent of landing on Mars is apparently just away. That was the startling conclusion of a study in the Royal Society Open Science journal last week, which predicted that a woman could shatter the four-minute mile barrier with the help of aerodynamics. Not just any woman but Faith Kipyegon, the Kenyan Olympic 1500m champion and the greatest female middle distance runner in history. The reports were breathless, the coverage sympathetic. Naturally, Sir Roger Bannister's mythical 3:59:4 mile in May 1954 was evoked. All that was missing was detailed scrutiny or analysis. The first thing to say? The study, led by Prof Rodger Kram, a physiologist at the University of Colorado Boulder, is a serious piece of work – according to Dr Michael Joyner, an expert in human performance at the Mayo Clinic. In 1991 Joyner wrote a paper stating that it was physiologically possible to run a marathon in under two hours. At that point the world record was 2hr 06min 50sec. Nearly three decades later, Kipchoge proved him right by running 1:59:40 in Vienna in 2019, thanks to a quantum leap in super shoe technology and the help of 40 elite pacemakers, who subbed in and out of the run and adopted an arrow formation to help him draft and reduce wind resistance. Krum was part of Kipchoge's team for that run – which did not count as the official record – and in his latest paper he scrutinises the race in Monaco where Kipyegon obliterated the women's mile world record by almost 5sec. As he points out, her time of 4:07.64 was achieved despite poor drafting, and for being alone for the last 600m. Multiple equations follow. But essentially Krum's thesis is that if Kipyegon had teams of pacemakers in front and behind – something that wouldn't be allowed in an official world record attempt – she could have cut the level of wind resistance she faced by 72%. 'Our calculations suggest that with greatly improved (but reasonable) aerodynamic drafting, Kipyegon could break the four-minute mile barrier,' the paper concludes. 'We find that she could feasibly run 3:59.37 with two teams of female pacers (one 1.2m in front and one 1.2m in the back) who change out at 800m.' The experts do note, however, that there is 'considerable variability among the drafting effectiveness values reported in the literature'. And this is where every coach I speak to starts to wince, before stressing the vast gap between theory and reality. Steve Magness, a renowned coach and the author of The Science of Running, reckons that in practice 'you're looking at a second and a half, maybe slightly more' from better drafting in that race. Not the nearly 8sec needed. But the study does raise an interesting question. What will it take for a woman to shatter the four‑minute mile barrier? Crucially, says Magness, someone would need to be capable of running a 4x400m relay leg in about 50sec, and an 800m in around 1:53 – something no woman except Jarmila Kratochvilova and Nadezhda Olizarenko in the dark days of the 1980s has ever achieved. 'Women are a little bit more aerobic than men,' Magness says. 'But the demands to run a four minute mile are the demands to run a four-minute mile. And we have a good idea historically of what it takes.' Sign up to The Recap The best of our sports journalism from the past seven days and a heads-up on the weekend's action after newsletter promotion Finding fancy new training methods will not bridge the gap. Joyner owns a book, How They Train, written by Fred Wilt in the 50s, which he says still contains many of the methods used by top athletes today. Magness points out that milers have been employing the legendary British coach Frank Horwill's Five Pace Training Theory for decades. So that leaves us with further advances in super‑shoe technology. And according to Trevor Painter, coach of the Olympic 800m gold medallist Keely Hodgkinson, considerable help is on its way. 'Nike's tech team came out to South Africa earlier this year to show us samples of what's to come,' he told me. 'Next year there's a new shoe coming out which is like: 'Wow, this is a bit of space age.' It will shave tenths off track times, no doubt.' What does Painter make of Kipyegon's chances? 'She has run 1:57 high for 800m but in the right race can probably go 1:55. Can she go sub-four with shoe improvements and with the help of a male pacemaker? Possibly. She often runs the latter half of the race alone at the front, so you never know.' Another way to get closer, Joyner says, would be to attempt a record on the banked and ridiculously quick indoor track in Boston in the US, where Grant Fisher recently set the indoor 5,000m world record. But even with all these incremental gains, there is still some way to go. 'I've learned my lesson from the sub‑two marathon attempt to never say never,' Magness says. 'But we're still too far out. The shoe tech will get us closer. Pacing will help a little bit. Using Maurten's bicarb system [which allows athletes to legally push harder and faster doing high-intensity exercise] will make a slight but significant difference. But I don't think it makes up that gap. Seven seconds is still seven seconds, which is a lot in a mile. When someone gets to 4:02-4:03, then it would be like: 'OK, we've got a shot.'' Joyner agrees, but still wants to see Kipyegon give it a whirl. 'I hope she tries it,' he says. 'And if she runs 4:03 or 4:04, that's hardly a failure, is it?'
