[Pic at link, obviously.] Just over two weeks after asserting himself as the next great hope of American track and field, Cooper Lutkenhaus was beginning his day as he always did. It was 7 a.m. at the start of the workweek in Justin. Later the sixteen-year-old would have to attend his junior-year classes at Northwest High School. For now it was time to run.
Even before August third of this year—when Lutkenhaus registered the fourth-fastest eight-hundred-meter time in American history at the U.S. Outdoor Championships in Eugene, Oregon, and became the youngest U.S. athlete to ever qualify for the World Athletics Championships—everyone in Justin knew how fast Lutkenhaus was. When a teenager moves as quickly as he does, it’s hard not to notice. Sweat beaded off Lutkenhaus’s neck that Monday morning; the shadow of his school’s nine-thousand-seat football stadium drifted over the track before him. AC/DC’s “Thunderstruck” started playing from a Bluetooth speaker. Lutkenhaus leaned forward, then took off.
His six-foot-one frame whipped into gear, blowing past orange cones positioned at two-hundred-meter intervals. Lutkenhaus’s coach at Northwest, Chris Capeau, clicked his stopwatch when the athlete swept by. Lutkenhaus hit his first curve in a time of 30.51 seconds—roughly a 4:02-minutes-per-mile pace. Over the next fifteen minutes he completed a workout consisting of these two-hundred-meter reps, and after it was over, Lutkenhaus laced up a pair of racing spikes and ran three hundred meters all out. “I told him this morning,” said Capeau, who had arrived at Northwest the previous February, “‘You look like you’re totally back to you: emotionally, physically.’ Today was a good day.”
It’s hard to believe that someone as young as Lutkenhaus could keep his head after reaching such great heights so quickly. About five months ago he had his braces taken off. Not long after that, he began shaving, got his license, and started driving a blue 2003 Chevy Silverado. On weekends, he watched the Cowboys with his family. His bedroom was, and remains, a shrine to running: Multiple pairs of golden track spikes sit above his bed’s headboard, and posters of American running greats Steve Prefontaine and Erriyon Knighton hang on his walls.
Now, after one miraculous race, he’s become an object of intense fascination in the sports universe and beyond, and he’s risen to the rank of the elite athletes he’s long looked up to. Praise is piling on from all over, including from track’s biggest stars; others think of him as some kind of freak anomaly. A few weeks ago he signed a sponsorship deal with Nike, effectively marking his transition from high school runner to professional. His first race as a pro will be September 16, in Tokyo—it’ll also be his first time competing outside the U.S. In Japan, this young Texan will do something that seemed impossible a few months ago: don the Stars and Stripes on the track with the whole world watching.
Sponsors and analysts alike recognized that Lutkenhaus might be the next big thing in track and field. One of the first people to congratulate him after his run was Paul Moser, a representative from Nike whom Lutkenhaus had met in the past. (Weeks later, Lutkenhaus signed a deal with him.) The immediate interest wasn’t unique. Just a year earlier, a similar influx of attention had befallen sixteen-year-old Quincy Wilson, who was selected to represent the U.S. at the Paris Olympics as a member of the men’s four-by-four-hundred-meter relay team, with whom he won a gold medal.
But Wilson is a sprinter; every so often, a young phenom will explode onto the scene in the one-hundred-meter or two-hundred-meter distances, and may or may not see continued success as they age. (Wilson competed in Eugene but failed to make the national team.) Lutkenhaus, on the other hand, is a middle-distance runner, most of whom don’t reach their peaks until their mid or late-twenties.