Cooper Lutkenhaus, 16, tries to shock the running world again

How Cooper Lutkenhaus, a teenager from Texas, became one of the biggest attractions at this week's track and field world championships in Japan

All the racers in the men’s 800 meters at track and field’s world championships in Tokyo this week share a few qualities. Each is lithe but strong. And each possesses the high-tech spikes and huge aerobic capacity that, over the past year, have combined to make this history’s fastest era of half-mile racing.

There is, however, one outlier: Cooper Lutkenhaus, who’ll be missing his English literature class to be there.

By any reasonable expectation, Cooper Lutkenhaus should not have qualified for this meet, the equivalent of track and field’s Super Bowl, by finishing second at the U.S. championships last month. No one as young as Lutkenhaus — who was 16 years, 7 months and 16 days old during the U.S. men’s 800-meter final — had ever before qualified to represent the U.S. at the sport’s top global championship.

Precedent wasn’t his only problem as he rounded the final curve in Eugene, Oregon, on Aug. 3. The most immediate problem facing the teenage Texan was that with 150 meters to go, facing the deepest field of half-milers in U.S. history, Lutkenhaus was still in seventh place in a race where the top three would qualify for worlds, and 15 meters behind the leader, a huge margin in a two-lap event.

“Obviously, I was ranked with the slowest [personal record] that I can think of in that final, but I just think, ‘Why not? Why can’t I make the team?’” Lutkenhaus said. “Obviously, that’s easier said than done, but I just think being able to have the confidence that, I mean, if they can do it, why can’t I? And obviously those guys in that race were a lot older than me, but I don’t know — I was just excited to race them.”