Emmanuel Kiprono, Cooper Lutkenhaus and Tate Taylor Are the Men’s Rising Star Finalists

World Athletics has named Kenya’s Emmanuel Kiprono and Americans Cooper Lutkenhaus and Tate Taylor as the three finalists for its 2026 Men’s Rising Star Award, which goes to the year’s best under-20 athlete. Each of them won at least one world title this season, and the winner will be named at the World Athletics Awards in Monaco on Nov. 29.

Kiprono, who turns 18 on Christmas Day, is the only distance runner of the three. He took the 3,000m at the World U20 Championships in Eugene in August by 19.51 seconds, running 7:28.28. That cut almost 14 seconds from the championship record and left him only 0.09 seconds outside Yomif Kejelcha’s world U20 record of 7:28.19. Back in January he had finished second in the U20 race at the World Cross-Country Championships in Tallahassee, two seconds behind his Kenyan teammate Frankline Kibet. He is still at school, at St. Francis Kimuron High School near Iten, which also produced David Rudisha, as LetsRun reported after Eugene.

Lutkenhaus was born just six days before Kiprono and has spent most of the year racing against senior athletes. In March he won the 800m at the World Indoor Championships in Toruń, Poland, in 1:44.24, with Belgium’s Eliott Crestan 0.14 seconds back. At 17 years and 93 days, he became the youngest athlete to win an individual world title at any indoor or outdoor championships.

Within four days in June he won his first two Diamond League races, taking Stockholm in 1:42.70 ahead of 2023 world champion Marco Arop and then edging Olympic champion Emmanuel Wanyonyi in Oslo by a hundredth of a second. His 1:42.08 there moved him to third on the U.S. all-time list, behind Bryce Hoppel and Josh Hoey. In July he added the U.S. outdoor title to the indoor one he had won earlier in the year.

Taylor, an 18-year-old sprinter from San Antonio who has signed with Texas Tech, also beat an Olympic champion this summer. At the Prefontaine Classic on July 4 he won the 200m in 19.75 into a headwind, with Botswana’s Letsile Tebogo, the 2024 Olympic gold medalist, second in 19.93. That was a U.S. high school record. A month later he was back at Hayward Field for the U20 championships, where he won the 100m in 9.94 and the 200m in a championship record of 19.83, then anchored the U.S. team to the 4x100m relay title. Among teenagers, only Erriyon Knighton (19.49) and Gout Gout (19.67) have run faster over 200m.

Knighton is also the last American to win the award, in 2021 and again in 2022. Wanyonyi, the man Lutkenhaus beat in Oslo, won it in 2023, Italy’s Mattia Furlani took it in 2024, and Kenyan steeplechaser Edmund Serem was last year’s winner. A win for Kiprono would give Kenya three of the last four.

The Rising Star prizes are handed out on the same night as Men’s and Women’s World Athlete of the Year. Sabastian Sawe is one of the three men’s finalists, and his sub-two-hour marathon is also up for Moment of the Year, while Masai Russell, Melissa Jefferson-Wooden and Audrey Werro make up the women’s shortlist.