With four laps to go in the 10,000-meter run, Kieran Tuntivate knew he was onto something special. So did the announcers watching.
“28:45 [personal] best. That’s the national record in Thailand. He is going to rip that thing apart.”
They were still struggling to pronounce the last name of the Thai-American upstart, a 24-year-old Harvard graduate who lacked the pedigree of other runners in the pack. But they could see it clearly: At the pace he was running, Kieran was going to qualify for the Olympics.
Minutes later, he did just that, booking his ticket to Tokyo with a blistering, record-shattering time of 27:17.14 – comfortably under the Olympic qualifying standard of 27:30.
“It was definitely a surprise,” Kieran said of his run that night at The Ten, an exclusive race held in California in February. “But maybe not as much to me as someone looking at…
