Eleven teenagers won medals at the UK Indoor Champs in Birmingham including multi-talented Thea Brown and triple jumpers Tito Odunaike and Leila Newth.
Young athletes such as sprinter Gout Gout from Australia, 800m runner Cooper Lutkenhaus from the United States and miler Sam Ruthe of New Zealand have made headlines in the sport lately due to their precocious ability and eye-catching performances. American track fans call them “teen phenoms” and part of the enduring appeal is the question of whether they will go on to become global superstars or simply fizzle away into semi-obscurity.
It seems athletes are increasingly excelling at a younger age and this was evident at the UK Indoor Championships this month.
In total, teenage athletes won medals in 11 events in Birmingham and this included a 16-year-old winning gold and a mere 15-year-old winning bronze, both in the triple jump.
They are as follows:
Men’s triple jump – Tito Odunaike, gold, age 16
Women’s high jump – Thea Brown, silver, 18
Men’s 400m – Harry Bradley, silver, 19
Men’s high jump – Regan Corrin, silver, 18
Men’s long jump – Daniel Emegbor bronze, 17
Men’s triple jump – Henry Harley, bronze, 17
Women’s 800m – Shaikira King, bronze, 17
Women’s 60m hurdles – Thea Brown, bronze, 18
Women’s triple jump – Leila Newth, bronze, 15
Men’s 3000m walk – Fraser Higginson, bronze, 18
Women’s para 60m – Madeline Down, gold, 18; Rebecca Scott, silver, 19
The men’s triple jump was particularly notable with the 16-year-old Odunaike at one point leading two 17-year-olds, Harley Henry and Sean-Connor Atafo, before Jude Bright-Davies, a relative veteran at 26, leapt into the silver medal spot.
Gold medals also went to athletes barely out of their teens as well, such as Renee Regis, 20, in the women’s 200m and Daniel Goriola, also 20, in the men’s 60m hurdles. What’s more, in the women’s 60m, Nell Desir, just 17, finished fourth.
“Extraordinary,” is how Coe described Lutkenhaus’s 1:42.27 for 800m aged 16 when the World Athletics president was asked about him in December. “It’s happening in a lot of sports at the moment. A couple of Premier League sides were playing two 15-year-old kids recently and one of them made such an impact he won the game in the dying embers.
“You just have to accept there is some outstanding talent and coming through younger than they probably have in the past and it’s probably a testament to good quality coaching.”
Coe added: “One word of caution is the biggest challenge and highest attrition period is the age of 16-17 to the senior ranks. The sobering stat that we’ve always looked at is that the majority of athletes who even win medals at world junior champs don’t even make it through to their senior national team two or three years later.
“So the handling of those athletes when they show such prodigious talent at an unexpected age, you can sit back and celebrate it but it also poses some really big challenges for the coaching structure and sometimes the parental care network so that you continue the same progression. We don’t want them to look back at the age of 40 and say ‘yes, I was really good for one season’.”
Hobbs Kessler, the US miler who was fifth in the Olympic 1500m in Paris, told Track & Field News this month: “It’s beyond me. Sam Ruthe, Cooper Lutkenhaus and all those. I don’t even know what to make of it.
“I know I’ve been the benefactor of this, but this fixation with the prodigy seems to be a really big thing. I feel like I got almost more attention in high school when I had the promise to do what I’m doing now. The people that have medal prospects are more exciting to fans than people that are actually medaling.
“I think it’s kind of weird and I don’t think it’s super healthy to be focused on what you run at any given age. I think it should be consistency in your peak. I do acknowledge how exciting it is, but I don’t know why. It’s insane.”
There have been plenty of studies into why teenage athletes either progress or hit a brick wall when they reach their 20s. One of the theories is that athletes who often finished second or third in their teens will be hungrier to make it, whereas the teenagers who always win easily will get complacent.
As any experienced coach or long-term fan of athletics will know, though, teenage triumph do not guarantee senior success in future. For every Usain Bolt there are countless teenage ‘phenoms’, ‘talents’ and ‘prodigies’ who fall by the wayside during the notoriously tricky transition into the senior ranks.
One of the most dramatic examples comes from the 2002 World Under-20 Championships in Jamaica. Racing on home soil and just a month before his 16th birthday, Usain Bolt sped to victory in the 200m. The women’s 200m winner at those same championships, however, Vernicha James of Britain, only competed for a further two seasons before packing up due to injuries and disillusionment.
The first European Under-20 Championships I covered for AW was the 1999 event in Riga. The golden girl of the championship was German sprinter Sina Schielke after winning the 100m, 200m and 4x100m titles during a red-hot few days in the Latvian capital.
Although she went on to run slightly quicker in 2001-2002, it’s fair to say she didn’t reach the same heights as a senior sprinter and instead ended up on the cover of Playboy magazine in 2005.
Go back further in time and Kirk Dumpleton famously beat Steve Ovett and Seb Coe in the same race to win the 1972 English Schools cross-country crown and he went on to run well for a number of years, although obviously not at the same level as Ovett and Coe.
Back in Britain, Emily Pidgeon was dubbed the “new Paula Radcliffe” and her many teenage triumphs included the European junior 5000m title, which came just a few weeks after her 16th birthday and London’s Olympic bid victory in July 2005. She made the AW cover a number of times during her youth, too, including aged 12 (below). As she moved into the senior ranks she continued to post times that most athletes would kill for, but she hung up her spikes in 2014 at the age of just 24.
In 2016, the former AW editor Mel Watman did his own survey of young athlete statistics, looking at what happened to the 90 winners of English Schools track and field titles at the 2006 championships.
A decade later, when the athletes would have been aged between 24 and 29 years old and at the peak of their careers, Watman found that just 11 of the 42 winners of girls’ events and eight of the 48 boys’ winners went on to gain a senior international vest.
The thing about many of the current teenagers, though, is that they are already reaching major championships or winning national titles, as the results in Birmingham last week show.
Look out for the March issue of AW magazine, featuring an in-depth interview with Sam Ruthe plus an interview with Tito Odunaike