Cooper Lutkenhaus at the 2025 World Athletics Championships in Tokyo (
Patrick Smith / Getty Images)
By Owen Murray
It took a second for 16-year-old Cooper Lutkenhaus, sitting at home with the Cowboys game playing on TV, to remember the last time he was bored. It’s not something the owner of the U18 800m world-best time usually gets the luxury of, but it happens every so often.
“Maybe this morning,” he decided, “because I didn't have to run today, so I was kind of just laying around, but I'm going out tonight to buy a couple of clothing items that I might need for school this week.”
Over the span of his sophomore year of high school, Lutkenhaus broke the high school 800m record three times. He leaped to the forefront of the track and field world, and went from high school cross country to the World Athletics Championships. Over the next year, he’ll work to qualify for the World Athletics U20 Championships Oregon 26, where he could return to Hayward Field at the University of Oregon to continue that climb. His coach, Chris Capeau, describes him as “relentless” (a word he used six times in his interview) but he also calls him “joyful” and a kid. Together, they’re walking the line between high schooler and world record holder — and they’re winning.
“People will kind of put these hard things on him,” Capeau said. “The good part is it doesn't faze him. He wants the bar to be higher. He wants the standard to be raised.”
But Lutkenhaus is still 16, and so the night before he would run in the biggest race of his life, at the USATF Outdoor Championships, he was a few blocks away at the perfect place: Track Town Pizza. The marquee board for the nearly 50-year-old local spot has swapped between a Prefontaine Classic advertisement and one reading “Wear Green and Yell ‘O’,” and he was eating what he called “probably not the best day-before food” and sitting with his family.
It wasn’t the athlete center that was set up south of Hayward Field, with cold tubs and mini fridges full of Gatorade. It wasn’t the hotel with rows of conference rooms and a bed. It wasn’t glamorous, but it’s wooden booths, TVs on every wall and framed Oregon football newspapers.
It’s tradition for a family that has been doing this for a while. This isn’t his first time in Eugene — not even the first time this summer. That was a little less than a month before, when he ran 1:45.45 on a rainy Saturday at Hayward Field to break his own high school record, which he initially set a few months earlier at 1:46.26, a couple of hundred miles north at the Brooks PR Invitational.
They’re also there because the Lutkenhaus family is together. It’s not often they get to be in one place. The three boys — George Jr., Andrew and Cooper — are split between college and high school. This weekend, they all flew in.
“I feel like I've been in Eugene so many times now, that it almost feels like almost a home track besides the one I run on every day,” Lutkenhaus said. “But the USAs trip was…honestly, I think it went perfect.”
Patrick Smith / Getty Images)The next day, Lutkenhaus stood on the red warmup track outside Hayward Field. Normally, what’s notable is that it circles six tennis courts and a turf soccer field used by students. For the weekend, it was crowded with his heroes. Somewhere among them was the 800m pack — which included Lutkenhaus’ favorite runner, American record holder Bryce Hoppel.
“I want to be able to be a person like that,” Lutkenhaus said. “I look up to Bryce. To be able to see him doing so well in his career and trying to do what he can do…It's really cool.”
Two years ago, Lutkenhaus saw Hoppel run in the 800m final in the World Athletics Championships in Budapest. He’s pretty sure he was watching on his phone at school. It’s sort of what he does.
“If you go on my school computer and go on YouTube, there's just (videos of) 1500m and 800m finals, from Olympics and World Championships,” he said. “I just love to watch the sport for what it is.”
When he’s lifting weights outside, he’ll turn on full runs of collegiate 10,000m races. “I just love to see the sport, especially when there's Americans in the race, that's always more exciting to get to see some of the best athletes in the world compete.”
The championship race itself is well documented, but it deserves some perspective. Before 2025, five American men had ever run faster than 1:43. On the day of the race, Lutkenhaus’ high school record (1:45.45) was two seconds behind the collegiate record (1:43.25).
He closed the final 200m of the final race in 25.42 seconds — faster than any other runner by more than a second. He surged from seventh to second, and passed Hoppel near the line. His final time, 1:42.27, is the U18 world best, the fourth-fastest ever by an American and the 19th-fastest in world history.
After they crossed the line, 22-hundredths of a second apart, Hoppel made a beeline for Lutkenhaus.
“Keep it up,” he told him. “I think you can be one of the best ever.”
Some time before Lutkenhaus was in the media tent, Hoppel was there, too. He had a bronze medal around his neck, but he was being asked about the second-place finisher. He waved his hands.
“I don’t know how to even fathom that yet,” Hoppel said to a scrum of reporters. “I was telling someone earlier, I don’t even know what I was doing at 16.”
The mixed zone is a difficult place to be bored, especially when most of the athletes are being asked about you. Lutkenhaus walked on the hard flooring to the end of the backdrop, where the scrum was stacked three-deep and two-high (someone is on a chair, trying to get an angle with their phone). The first question came:
“Did you have any idea how fast you were going?”
The next three weeks were a blur. He walked out of the tent and got on a flight six hours later (“I slept maybe an hour in a span of 48,” he said). There would be no time to be bored; he called Capeau from a gas station in Eugene to recap the weekend. Later that month, he’d walk through the newly-open door and sign his first professional contract with Nike.
“It maybe took three weeks before I could really relax and look back at everything,” Lutkenhaus said.
During those three weeks, Hoppel asked for Lutkenhaus’ phone number. He made the call. They talked about the upcoming World Championships in Tokyo — Lutkenhaus asked if there was anything he needed to bring — and then got to the race.
“It was just being able to hear from him, saying your life's going to be pretty crazy,” Lutkenhaus said. “Especially those weeks leading into world championships, which definitely weren’t (chill). They were crazy.”
His race in Tokyo was well-documented, too. Lutkenhaus finished seventh in his heat, in 1:47.68, and was eliminated after jumping early into the outside lanes and running most of his race there. He calls it “the worst race tactics I’ve had” but thinks he’s learned from it.
When Lutkenhaus and Capeau got into an Uber to travel to a USATF banquet the next afternoon, it was quiet for a while. The race had sat with them for almost a day. Then, Capeau started talking.
“I forget how I worded it, but it was almost something like, ‘Hard moment, but what an incredible year, right?’” Capeau said. “The moment sucked, but the year? Oh, my god. Tell me about it.”
It’s the battle, as Capeau described it, of putting the year in perspective. One year ago, Lutkenhaus was still a star — but one looking at college offers. In the Uber, he was a teenage World Championship qualifier less than a month removed from turning pro.
In the car, Lutkenhaus started going on his phone and counting the number of races he’d been through in the past year. He went through the list, and it crossed 30.
“If we ended my year at Nike Outdoor Nationals, when I ran 1:45, I would have been happy with it,” Lutkenhaus said. “It would have been a great year, but then it just kept on going. I think if you counted my cross country season, I was racing for over a year…that's a long time.”
They sat together and took time to put the year in perspective.
“We’re both still kind of bummed,” Capeau said. “You have to be able to file it away. You’ve got to have the second to let the emotion be real, but also (say), ‘Here’s the things we did do. Here’s the success we did have. Here’s the blessing of this moment — it doesn’t feel good, but it allows us to grow up with it.’”
For now, though, he’s got homecoming. The Cowboys game is on TV, and he’s sitting in his house in Justin, Texas doing his best to take time to be bored. It hasn’t been easy. For now, he’s “off” — and that means something to Capeau.
“When we're off, we're off,” the coach said. “We don't talk about racing, we don't talk about training. We just are off. He's just out there riding the bike with other guys and talking to them, and goes back to being a 16-year old kid.”
In less than a year, he’ll aim to return to Hayward Field to run at the place that feels like home again, in the World Athletics U20 Championships. There’s no longer a lack of expectation for the soon-to-be-17-year-old.
He went to another school’s homecoming last week, but he’s not making it to his own this year — instead, he’ll be in Lubbock for the Texas Tech football game. On Oct. 9, he took up his newest job, as the Northwest High School Cross Country team manager. He walked around the course with Capeau. He took the obligatory photos. He joked.
“I think about it in the aspect of that he can absolutely go and train with 28 year olds,” Capeau said. “But also, it's like, is a 28 year old going to be a 16-year-old's best friend? Probably not, probably shouldn't, right? What he does get to do with the other 16-year-olds on his team is he gets to laugh.”
Sometimes, he gets to be bored, too. It’s what happens when you win.
