Roll over Jakob Ingebrigtsen. There were enough inexplicably fast times by a new breed of boy racers in the last weekend alone to make the young Norwegian appear like a slouch. Even if he might beg to differ.
Okay, Ingebrigtsen isn’t that young any more. At age 25, his best years and fastest times may well be ahead of him, but most of the middle-distance records he set as a teenager have now been blown away. It won’t be long before this latest bunch of running phenoms start coming after his championship titles too.
Say hello to Sam Ruthe. Before last Saturday’s indoor meeting in Boston University, it’s fair to assume Ruthe’s extraordinary talent was largely unknown outside his native New Zealand. At age 16 he’d never even raced indoors before, for the simple reason New Zealand doesn’t have any indoor running tracks. Few more rugby pitches over there, naturally.
After making the 50-hour, 9,000-mile journey from his home in Tauranga, a coastal city in New Zealand’s North Island, Ruthe lined up for the mile in Boston thinking a sub-four clocking would be decent. He was also greeted by one of the worst New England snow storms in years, further adding to the logistical challenge of getting to the start line.
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Utterly undaunted, Ruthe bided his time against far senior opposition, before kicking for the victory in 3:48.88. You don’t have to be an athletics aficionado to appreciate that 3:48.88 is fast – very fast. But at age 16? It’s hard to fathom how Ruthe is now one of the fastest men of all time, when he still looks like a boy – and hardly looked out of breath at the finish.
Ruthe was already the youngest human, dead or alive, to break the four-minute barrier in the mile. In March of last year, aged 15, he ran 3:58.35 in New Zealand. Less than a year later he’s run almost 10 seconds faster. His time smashed the world under-18 record, also breaking John Walker’s New Zealand mile record of 3:49.08, which had stood since 1982.
Just 24 hours later, at the Millrose Games in New York, Cam Myers from Australia lined up in the Wanamaker Mile at age 19. Myers already has some big results next to his name and, just like Ruthe, defied his tender years to win by almost a full second in 3:47.57. Again, all appearing well within himself.
Myers took some big scalps too, including three-time Wanamaker Mile winner and Olympic bronze medallist Yared Nuguse from the US. At 19, his 3:47.57 is also notably faster than the former world indoor mile record of 3:49.78 set by Eamonn Coghlan in 1983, when he was 30, and which stood for another 14 years.
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Earlier in the Millrose Games, the 600m race was won by Cooper Lutkenhaus, just two months after he turned 17, in a world under-20 record of 1:14.15. The US high school student has already been shattering underage records and his opponents’ hopes at a blistering rate, running a spectacular 1:42.27 to finish second in the 800m at the US Championships in Eugene, Oregon last summer.
That time would have won Lutkenhaus all but three Olympic 800m titles in history, and he’s still in his junior year at Northwest High School in the small Texan town of Justin, population 4,409. He also joked after his Millrose win that Ruthe running 3:48 at 16 is making him feel old already.
Of course, none of these superfast underage times automatically transfers to senior success, although Ingebrigtsen has done all right. His mile best at age 16 was 3:56.29, at the time also the youngest man in history to run sub-four. In a brilliant interview in the Guardian last month, Ingebrigtsen told Sean Ingle that he started training professionally from the age of four or five, and is still driven by his unrelenting competitive spirit, even after just undergoing surgery on an Achilles tendon.
“That is just how I am, and how my life has been,” said Ingebrigtsen, a now double Olympic champion. “I’m always competing, even if the odds are against me. Even when I was 12 years old and competing against seniors at national level, I still wanted to win.”
Ingebrigtsen unquestionably broke down some psychological barriers too. He moved the goalposts for teenage middle-distance runners around the world, including our own Nick Griggs, who has often cited Ingebrigtsen as an inspiration.
Griggs is no stranger to underage records; in 2022, less than three months after turning 17, he became the youngest Irish runner to break four minutes for the mile, clocking 3:56.40 at the Sport Ireland arena in Dublin. Now 21, Griggs is also enjoying the best indoor season of his life, breaking his own Irish under-23 records over 3000m and 5000m.
For now, Ruthe and the other boys are operating on a different level. There’s been a lot of talk about what else might be behind their astonishing times, starting with the fact that the indoor track at Boston University, reconfigured in 2002, is considered the fastest in the world. Believe it or not, something about the wooden construction and the asymmetrical geometry of the turns helps the runners maintain their speed.
The super-spike technology has changed things too, just as Nike’s super-shoes forever altered marathon running records. So has the Wavelight technology, which has revolutionised pacemaking. Also on everyone’s lips is sodium bicarb, the fast-trending and perfectly legal performance enhancer, small amounts of which can help reduce acidosis and the sense of exhaustion during intense exercise. Just go easy on the amount.
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Ruthe admits he’s been using sodium bicarb before his record runs but, perhaps more than anything, he also satisfies the single most important factor when it comes to athletics potential: choosing your parents wisely. His parents, Ben and Jess, were both champion runners in New Zealand and, better still, his grandparents Trevor and Rosemary Wright were also Olympic runners.
He admits, too, he wasn’t exactly raised on stories of John Walker or Peter Snell, or any other legends of New Zealand running. So his is a new generation in every sense. Just like Ingebrigtsen, Ruthe is also displaying a remarkable level of maturity, which he’ll need if he keeps going the way he’s going. The LA Olympics are only two years away, and he’ll be a grown man of 18 by then.
