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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.

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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 da

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