fast time

Ridgemont High, give way to a suburban school near Fort Worth. That’s where the fast times will be this year.

Cooper Lutkenhaus, an incoming junior at Northwest High School in Justin, Texas, was so impressive in setting an age-group world record at the U.S. Track & Field Championships on Sunday that a respected distance running coach and author declared it was “the most impressive athletic feat in history.”

In a social media post, Steve Magness, who wrote “The Science of Running,” said Lutkenhaus’ performance that included passing three of the nation’s fastest men in an electrifying stretch run “makes high school LeBron look like nobody.

“Cooper Lutkenhaus, take a bow.”

Current Lakers star LeBron James, of course, was a prodigy on the basketball court at St. Vincent–St. Mary High School in Akron, Ohio, and went straight to the NBA upon graduating in 2003.

Lutkenhaus, 16, won’t be in school for long, either. He will become the youngest American to compete in the World Athletics Championships when he travels to Tokyo on Sept. 13-21. This time he’ll have no age-group restriction, not after posting the fourth-best time in U.S. history (1:42.27) and nearly catching 800-meter champion Donavan Brazier (1:42.16).

In the waning seconds, Lutkenhaus turned on the jets, going from seventh to second place while passing reigning indoor 800 meter world champion Josh Hoey as well as Olympians Brandon Miller and Bryce Hoppel, all of whom were clustered with Brazier at the front.

Lutkenhaus’ time was the fastest ever for a runner under 18.

“I saw someone coming up and I was like, ‘Dang, this could be the high schooler,’ ” Brazier told reporters. “This kid’s phenomenal. I’m glad that I’m 28 and maybe have a few more years left in me, hopefully won’t have to deal with him in his prime because that dude is definitely special.”

Does wunderkind describe Lutkenhaus? He’s only been running track for three years, and he said his strategy of accelerating over the last quarter of the race was crafted in middle school.

“I’ve always kind of had a natural spot with 200 [meters] to go,” Lutkenhaus told reporters. “Ever since middle school that’s kind of been the spot I’ve really pushed from. Kind of just decided to go back to middle school tactics with 200 to go and really just give everything I had left.”

Less surprising was a late surge by Noah Lyles in the 200 meters that enabled him to pass Kenny Bednarek en route to a world-leading time of 19.63. Lyles might have challenged his personal best American record of 19.31, but as he passed Bednarek with five meters remaining he turned his head and stared down his competitor.

Bednarek retaliated, giving Lyles a shove before they shook hands. Afterward, Bednarek shrugged and chalked up the incident to “Noah is gonna be Noah.”

“If he wants to stare me down, that’s fine,” Bednarek said. “I’m very confident I can beat him. What he said doesn’t matter. It’s just what he did. It’s unsportsmanlike [crap] and I don’t deal with that.”

More drama occurred before championships when Sha’Carri Richardson was arrested and charged with fourth-degree domestic violence a week ago at the Seattle-Tacoma International Airport, according to a police report.

The reigning 100-meter world champion was charged with assaulting her boyfriend, sprinter Christian Coleman, as the couple were going through security. A police officer reviewed camera footage and observed Richardson grab Coleman’s backpack and yank it away, the report said.

Coleman tried to step around Richardson and she pushed him into a wall. Later she appeared to throw headphones at him.

In the report, however, the officer indicated that Colemen “did not want to participate any further in the investigation and declined to be a victim.”

Coleman defended Richardson when asked about the incident at the championships.

“She just has a lot of things going on, a lot of emotions and forces going on inside of her that not only I can’t understand, but nobody can,” he said. “Because she’s one of one.… I know that it’s been a tough journey for her this year. But she’s going to bounce back.

“Like I said, I see it every day. She’s the best female athlete in the world, and she’s going to be just fine. She’s going to be good. I’m going to be good, too.”

Once the racing took place, attention turned to Lutkenhaus. His time bettered the the U18 world record — set by Timothy Kitum of Kenya at the 2012 London Olympics — by 1.1 seconds.

“It is the most mind blowing HS performance in history,” Magness wrote on X. “Any high school phenom in history you can think of? This kid is better. I never thought we’d supplant Jim Ryun as the HS runner GOAT, but a sophomore in HS just did.”

North Salinas High sophomore Clara Adams ran the fastest time in the girls’ 400-meter finals at the CIF State Track & Field Finals last weekend.

She crossed the finish line .28 seconds ahead of her closest competitor.

But Adams is not the state champion. She was stripped of that title after she used a fire extinguisher to spray her cleats while on the field inside the track moments after the race.

“I was robbed,” Adams, 16, told The Times shortly after being disqualified from that event as well the 200 finals, which took place later in the meet.

Adams said CIF officials told her that she was being disqualified because she had been “unsportsmanlike,” but that’s not how she saw it at all.

“I was having fun,” Adams said, noting her win in the 400 marked her first state title. “I’d never won something like that before, and they took it away from me. I didn’t do anything wrong.”

She added: “I worked really hard for it and they took it from me, and I don’t know what to do.”

Days later, David Adams, who said he is the sprint coach at North Salinas, told The Times his daughter was “doing better” but still trying to cope with everything that unfolded Saturday afternoon at Buchanan High in Clovis.

“Clara’s hurt. She’s hurt right now,” David Adams said Wednesday. “She’s better today than Saturday. Saturday was fresh. It just happened. It was a shock. She felt numb. They made her sit there and watch while they put those other girls on the podium, knowing Clara’s the fastest 400-meter runner in the state of California.”

Clara Adams has been running competitively since age 6, her father said. She finished fourth in the 400 at last year’s state meet and won the event with a state-best time of 53.23 at the Central Coast Section championships last month. After posting the top qualifying time in Friday’s preliminaries, Adams surged ahead of Madison Mosby of St. Mary’s Academy in Inglewood to win the race with a time of 53.24.

Immediately afterward, Adams walked over to the wall in front of the stands and found her father, who reached down and handed her what he described as a “small” fire extinguisher. She then walked back across the track into the grass, where she sprayed her cleats as if she was putting out a fire — a move her father said was a tribute to former U.S. sprinter Maurice Greene, who similarly celebrated his win in the 100 at the 2004 Home Depot Invitational in Carson.

CIF officials apparently were not amused and disqualified Adams on the spot, awarding first place to Mosby. According to rules established by the National Federation of State High School Assns., “unsporting conduct” is defined as behavior that includes but is not limited to “disrespectfully addressing an official, any flagrant behavior, intentional contact, taunting, criticizing or using profanity directed toward someone.” The penalty is disqualification from the event in which the behavior took place and further competition in the meet.

The CIF did not respond to a request for comment from The Times.

According to David Adams, the officials “were really nasty” toward his daughter. They “tugged on her arm,” he said, “they were screaming in her face. I could hear it from where I was at. I could see it — I couldn’t hear exactly what they were saying, but they were just really nasty.”

Clara Adams said she specifically asked the officials to speak with her father about the disqualification, but they refused.

“They kept telling me, ‘It’s OK,’ and I was telling them, ‘It’s not OK,’ and they didn’t care,” she said. “They were trying to smile in my face, like them telling me ‘no’ amused them or something.”

David Adams said the officials would only speak to North Salinas head coach Alan Green, who declined to speak to The Times for this story.

“They told him that it was unsportsmanlike conduct,” David Adams said of the officials’ discussion with Green. “We were asking for the rule, the specific rule of what she did, and they didn’t really give anything. It was more of a gray area that gives them discretion to pick and choose what they feel is unsportsmanlike conduct.”

Adams disputes that his daughter behaved in a manner that could be considered unsportsmanlike.

“Looking at the film, Clara is nowhere near any opponent,” he said. “She’s off the track, on the grass. Her opponents are long gone off the track already, so she wasn’t in their face. It was a father-daughter moment. … She did it off the track because she didn’t want to seem disrespectful toward nobody. And they still found a reason to take her title away. They didn’t give her a warning or anything.”

He added that his daughter is a “very humble, really sweet kid.”

“I take responsibility for the situation. I’m taking full responsibility,” he said. “Clara has run several championship races and won and walked off the track. It’s just weird that she celebrates one time and now people, these strangers, these middle-aged people want to chase after her character?”

Greene, the four-time Olympic medalist who inspired Clara’s celebration, told KSBW-TV in Salinas that the CIF should reconsider its decision.

“If [the celebration] was away from everyone and not interfering with anyone, I would say reinstate her,” Greene said.

David Adams said he is trying to make that happen but so far the CIF won’t return his calls .

“We have an attorney on standby right now,” he said. “I don’t want to take it there, but I will fight this all the way. As long as I’m breathing I’m gonna fight it. But we’re trying to go through proper channels to give the CIF an opportunity to do the right thing. Having an attorney involved is our last resort, that means we tried everything.”