Against all odds, Kenneth Rooks, who burst onto the track scene seemingly out of nowhere only one year ago, won the silver medal in the 3,000-meter steeplechase Wednesday in Paris.
After running at the back of the pack for much of the race, Rooks took the lead with less than a lap to go and didn’t give it up until the final 80 meters, when defending Olympic champion Soufiane El Bakkali edged ahead of him en route to another Olympic victory.
El Bakkali, who has now won the last four world championships, including two Olympic Games, produced a time of 8:06.05. Rooks was second in 8:06.41, making him the second-fastest American ever and dropping his personal record by a whopping nine seconds. Kenya’s Abraham Kibiwot was third in 8:06.47.
“It was awesome,” Rooks told the Deseret News shortly before he had to report to routine post-race drug testing. “After the race, I was like, what the heck just happened? That was amazing. Incredible. I was just trying to take it all in. I’m super grateful to share this experience with my family, my wife, my in-laws and Coach (Ed) Eyestone.”
Rooks’ run ranks among the greatest Olympic performances ever by a current or former BYU track and field athlete. Alma Richards won the gold medal in the high jump in the 1912 Games. Frank Fredericks won silver medals in the 100- and 200-meter dashes in both the 1992 and 1996 Olympics. Ralph Mann won the silver medal in the 400-meter hurdles in the 1972 Olympics. And now Rooks has won the silver medal in the 2024 Games.
It was an audacious performance by Rooks, a relative novice on the international scene, and one that was wholly unexpected. He tried the steeplechase for the first time only three years ago, as a BYU freshman. He did so reluctantly, thinking it was his best chance to make BYU’s travel squad.
As a sophomore, he finished sixth in the NCAA championships; a year later he won the 2023 NCAA championships and two weeks later won the U.S. championship after falling 900 meters into the race. That qualified him to run in the 2023 world championships in Budapest, where he placed 10th. That was his first and only international competition before the Paris Olympic Games.
If that weren’t enough to stack the odds against Rooks, there was this: The steeplechase had been dominated by African runners, who had won the gold medal in each of the previous 10 Olympic Games and 22 of 30 medals. The U.S. had won just two medals during that time, a silver in 2016 and a bronze in 1984.
The unexpected
Nothing could have prepared anyone for what Rooks did in the Olympic final. His fastest time heading into the race was 8:15.08 — pedestrian by elite international standards. His credentials paled in comparison to others in the race. El Bakkali had run a time of 7:56.68. Girma held the world record of 7:52.11, set last year.
Rooks had made a living off running in relatively slow, tactical domestic races. Earlier in the week, hours after his semifinal race, Rooks himself wondered how he would handle a race at sub-8:10 pace or faster.
“That’s the big mystery,” said Rooks. “I feel capable of a lot more. … Whether it’s fast or slow, I’m going to try to stay in the hunt … I think the final will be very fast. They’re not going to want to mess around. If I were Girma going against Bakkali, I’d go out hard till he can’t go anymore.”
For his part, Eyestone said a month ago, while observing Rooks in a track workout in Provo, that Rooks was capable of running 8:06 or so, which of course proved to be spot on. “That wasn’t a mystery to me,” said Eyestone Monday, looking back. “I thought 8:06 was very much in his wheelhouse. My big concern was that it would go out in 7:52 pace.”
Eyestone’s race plan for Rooks was relatively simple: Hold back at 65- or maybe 64-second laps (65-second laps is 8:07 pace). “I thought anything faster than that would leave him gassed,” Eyestone explained Wednesday. While the rest of the 16-man field got caught up in a fast early pace, Rooks stuck to the plan, churning out 64- and 65-second laps, which left him running in 13th place through the early laps. On the fourth lap of the 7½-lap race, he was dead last.
‘Gritting my teeth’
“Sure enough, they took it out hard,” said Eyestone, “and after three laps I was second-guessing myself. He was dead last or close to it. I was thinking, what have I done? I’ve held this great athlete back. I was gritting my teeth and biting my nails.”
But then the pace began to slacken on the fourth lap.
“People started paying the price and falling off the pace,” said Eyestone. “Guys were feeling the effects of the early pace.”
It was an exercise in patience and poise for Rooks. With 1,000 meters to go (2½ laps), he finally went to work. He swung into the second lane and began to work his way up through the field. Later he would say how difficult this proved to be, trying to pick off rivals one by one, 15 in all. With the pace slackening, the field was bunched, and with 500 meters remaining everyone was still in contention.
With a little more than one lap to go, Rooks had worked his way up to sixth place and a short time later he moved into third.
“I was worried that I might have held him back, but then he moved up and I thought, OK, this is why you have a plan and this is why you stick to the plan,” says Eyestone.
With 350 meters to go, Rooks boldly swept by the Olympic champ, El Bakkali, and Kibiwot and moved into first place. Down the backstretch, it became a three-man race and Rooks actually gapped his more accomplished rivals.
The homestretch
“When he got the gap, I thought, OK, this is it,” says Eyestone. “Let’s see, he’s still got the water barrier and 200 meters to go and that was a hard move he made and he’s got the world record holder and the Olympic champion on his heels …”
Behind the three front-runners, the field was bunched and this created trouble as it often does. Girma, the world record holder from Ethiopia, fell coming off the barrier with about 200 meters to go.
The threesome swept into the homestretch in a knot of flying legs and arms, leaping the final barrier. El Bakkali passed Rooks to move into first place and sprinted to his second Olympic gold medal. Rooks held off Kibiwot to take the silver medal.
“He stuck to the plan,” said Eyestone, who recorded Rooks’ lap splits as 64, 65, 64, 67, 65, 65, 58, followed by a 30-second last 200.
“The goal was to get out and stay relaxed,” said Rooks. “If the race went out fast, I was going to be OK being toward the back. I just wanted to conserve as much energy as possible, but stay within striking distance. I was nervous, especially with where I had positioned myself, but we all were really in it as we got later in the race. I just got up in position to make that move at the end.”
“The race was what you saw,” said Eyestone. “It was amazing and inspiring.”
Eyestone thinks Rooks can run even faster in the future. “That’s not the fastest he will run,” said the coach. “If he doesn’t have to go four wide to work his way around other runners, if he runs a race that is rabbitted, he can run faster.”
