CEDAR CITY — Former Southern Utah University Thunderbird Cam Levins will compete for Canada in the penultimate event of the 2024 Paris Olympics — the men’s marathon.
The event is scheduled to be run Friday-Saturday, Aug 9-10, starting at midnight (Mountain Time).
This will mark his third time competing in the Olympics and his second time as a marathoner. Levins set the Canadian marathon record in 2018 and has since bested his own mark on three different occasions. His current record, which is for all of North America, stands at 2 hours, 5 minutes, 36 seconds, which he ran at the Tokyo Marathon in March of 2023.
“Cam is one of the greatest athletes to ever compete at SUU, and it has been amazing to watch his success in his professional career,” SUU head coach Eric Houle said in a news release. “We are incredibly proud of all of his hard work and are excited to watch him compete at the world’s highest level.”
While at SUU, Levins won the 2012 Outdoor National Championship in the 5,000- and 10,000-meter events. That same year, he won the Bowerman Award, the most prestigious trophy in collegiate track and field.
In 2022, he finished fourth place at the World Championships Marathon in Eugene, Oregon, solidifying his status as one of the top marathon runners in the World.
According to Levins’ bio on the Canadian Olympic Team website, his marathon debut was one to remember. In October 2018 at the Toronto Waterfront Marathon, he broke the 43-year-old Canadian men’s marathon record of 2:10:09 held by Jerome Drayton, replacing it with his mark of 2:09:25 as he finished fourth overall and was crowned national champion.
He then had three missed attempts to achieve the Olympic entry standard of 2:11:30 for Tokyo 2020, including at the 2019 Toronto Waterfront Marathon where he went out hard with the lead pack but then struggled in the last 10 kilometres and finished as the number three Canadian. With just a week before the qualification window closed, he ran 2:10:13 at the S7 Marathon in Austria in late May 2021 to secure his return ticket to the Olympic Games.
In 2022, Levins competed at the World Athletics Championships for the first time since 2015. In his first world championship marathon, he placed fourth for Canada’s best ever world championship result in the event. He also took more than two minutes off his national record time, finishing in 2:07:09.
Levins lowered the Canadian marathon record for a third time in March 2023 when he ran 2:05:36 to finish fifth at the Tokyo Marathon. That result qualified him to compete at Paris 2024. It came a month after he broke the Canadian record in the half marathon, running 1:00:18 in Vancouver.
Levins had made his Olympic debut at London 2012 where he became the first Canadian man to make the 5,000-meter final since 1968 and posted Canada’s best result in the men’s 10,000 since 1932. In January 2014 he set the Canadian indoor 5,000 record at 13:19.2 and followed that in May 2015 with a Canadian outdoor 10,000 record of 27:07.51.
He captured bronze in the 10,000 at the 2014 Commonwealth Games, a year after competing at his first outdoor World Athletics Championships. He also competed at the World Athletics Championships in 2015 as well as the Pan Am Games in Toronto.
In 2016, Levins suffered a devastating ankle injury and did not qualify on the track for the Olympic Games in Rio. He decided to change his entire training regimen to focus on becoming an elite marathoner.
