Amid all the hoopla over the one-two finish by Conner Mantz and Clayton Young at the U.S. Olympic Marathon Trials last February, another former BYU great, Rory Linkletter, has been largely overlooked. Never heard of him? He’s the other Utah native and BYU grad who has qualified for the Olympic marathon in Paris.
Linkletter has been overlooked in the U.S. largely because he doesn’t have the championship resume of Mantz and Young — his former BYU teammates — and because he’s going to represent Canada in the Olympics, not the U.S.
Linkletter finished 13th in the Zurich Seville Marathon in February, but, more importantly, he reached the finish line with a time of 2:08:01 to surpass the stiff Olympic qualifying standard by nine seconds. Canada subsequently selected him for that country’s Olympic team.
For Linkletter, it was another step in his rise in marathoning and professional road racing.
He was born in Canada and, following his parents’ divorce, moved to Utah with his mother when he was 5. He spent summers and vacations with his father in Calgary and the school year in Herriman. He didn’t become a U.S. citizen until 2021 and by then he had already thrown in with the Canadian team. The competition to make a national team isn’t as fierce as it is in the U.S., but, as it turned out, Linkletter would have qualified for the U.S. team, as well; he was one of the few in this part of the world who was able to meet the Olympic standard.
Asked why he chose to represent Canada, he says simply, “The answer is I’m proud to be Canadian.”
A tall order
Linkletter, who never won a national collegiate championship or even a state high school title, has accomplished one of the most difficult feats in running merely by making an Olympic marathon team.
The IOC and World Athletics — the governing body for international track and field — tightened the qualifying standards for the Olympic marathon based on what happened in the previous Olympics. In 2020, the field was capped at 80 men and 80 women and time qualifying standards were established. All those who met the time standards would make the cut (with a maximum of three per country), but no one anticipated what happened next. The Games were delayed for a year by the pandemic, the super shoes arrived en masse in the interim and times dropped across the board. The 2021 Olympic marathon field swelled to 106 men and 88 women.
As a result, the qualifying standard for the Paris Games was lowered dramatically, from 2:11:30 to 2:08:10 for men and 2:29:30 to 2:26:50 for women. It greatly impacted the men’s race. To put it in perspective, the men’s standard of 2:08:10 would have won every Olympic marathon except two (2008, 2012) and only seven U.S. marathoners have ever even run that fast.
Four of a kind
According to World Athletics, only 122 men in the world met the time-qualifying standard. That sounds like a lot, but many of them are from the same African nations — a total of 70 just from Kenya and Ethiopia combined — and there is a limit of three entries per country. There was actually a dearth of time qualifiers, so non-time qualifiers had to be added to the race to fill out the 80-man field.
The U.S. had only two athletes who met the time standard — Mantz and Young — but Leonard Korir was recently added to the race because he was among the top 80 in the world rankings. Canada produced two time qualifiers — Linkletter and Cam Levins. That means all four of the time qualifiers from the U.S. and Canada have strong ties to Utah. Mantz, Young and Linkletter graduated from Utah high schools and BYU; Levins competed for Southern Utah University.
“It’s kind of crazy when you think of the entire population ... we all have strong roots in Utah,” says Linkletter.
Mantz, Young and Levins were collegiate stars, winning five individual NCAA championships among them. Linkletter, whose biggest victory at Herriman High was a second-place finish in the 1,600-meter run at the state championships, was a walk-on at BYU.
He flourished under coach Ed Eyestone, although a championship eluded him. He earned four first-team All-America certificates, finishing second in the 10,000 at the 2017 NCAA outdoor championships, sixth in the NCAA indoor 5,000, eighth in the 5,000 at the 2018 NCAA outdoor championships and 15th in the NCAA cross-country championships.
“I was a little untapped as a high school runner,” he says. “It took Eyestone’s training to reach my potential.”
He joined the professional ranks in 2019 and signed a contract with Hoka (the shoe company) and began training with Northern Arizona Elite in Flagstaff, Arizona. He performed well that summer, finishing third in the 10,000 at the Canadian track championships and sixth in the Pan American Games. He closed out the 2020 season by running his second marathon, finishing with a time of 2:12:54. But the following year he grew dissatisfied with his performances, especially in the Boston Marathon, where he finished 33rd with a time of 2:23:34.
“I had some good moments, but it was inconsistent,” says Linkletter, who is married and has two children. “Things were not going well. I started to doubt myself. I started to wonder about my future (in the sport). It’s not easy to stay in the sport if you’re not doing well. A bad year or two can drag you down. It can affect your financial support, the races you’re invited to, the incentives the races offer. I thought, if I don’t pick things up, I’ll be kicked out of the sport. I knew I had to switch things up in my training.”
Changing things up
In what he calls “a preemptive move,” he left Hoka and the Northern Arizona Elite training group at the outset of 2022 and began to train with Ryan Hall, another Flagstaff-based coach and a former two-time Olympic marathoner. It was a leap of faith. Linkletter trained and raced without a contract for four months. In January — in his first race under Hall — he placed eighth in the Houston Half Marathon and set a Canadian record of 1:01:08. In May, he finished third in the 10,000 at the Canadian track championships. In July, he represented Canada in the world track and field championships and placed 20th in the marathon with a personal-record time of 2:10:24. By then, he had been rewarded with a contract from Puma.
“I always believed in my potential,” he says. “That’s why I left (the Hoka team).”
His career has taken off. In 2023, he ran a sub-four-minute mile for the first time (3:59.05 indoors in Boston) and placed 18th in the world track and field championships with a time of 2:12:16 in warm, humid conditions in Budapest.
In 2024, aside from knocking more than two minutes off his marathon PR in Seville, he was second in the 10,000 at the Canadian track championships, second in the Canadian 10K road championships, and sixth in the Houston Half Marathon with a PR of 1:01:02.
“I trusted my gut instinct and made the changes and it’s worked out really well,” says Linkletter. “Ryan has been an incredible fit. I’ve had the best two-and-a-half years of my running career.”
Linkletter returned to Utah for a couple of weeks in June to train with Mantz and Young, and “soak up this magic with the USA boys in Park City.” Looking ahead to Paris, he says, “I feel like I’m on track for one of my better (training) builds.”