A confident and healthy Marco Arop is ready for a fresh challenge at the Canadian track and field championships this weekend in Ottawa.
Instead of racing for a fifth consecutive title in the men’s 800 metres, he will compete in the 1,500 at Terry Fox Athletic Facility on Saturday at 7:07 p.m. ET.
Arop is grateful to be performing on the track, given how his body felt at the end of last season.
A right Achilles tendon injury that hampered him for much of 2025 lingered into the off-season, raising doubt about the 27-year-old’s availability for a 2026 campaign without a World Athletics Championships or Olympics.
“I wasn’t confident I would be able to race this year. I think running through [an injury] all season made it worse [and] I had to take my time [to let it heal]. It’s much better now and I’m feeling really good to do either [distance],” Arop said this week from his home training base in Starkville, Miss.
He gave a nod to longtime physiotherapist Marilou Lamy and Dr. Beatrice Deschenes St-Pierre, an Alberta-based sports medicine physician, “for getting me prepared to race again.
“Dealing with the injury and not having run 800s or fast for a while, I wanted to open [the season in] the event I was most comfortable with and that gave me confidence.”
Chris Woods, Arop’s coach, said the middle-distance runner only started wearing track spikes two or three days before finishing second at the June 7 Stockholm Diamond League in one minute 43.11 seconds, the fastest season-opening time of his career. Three days later, Arop was third in 1:43.33 at the Bislett Games in Oslo, Norway.
WATCH | Arop 3rd behind Cooper Lutkenhaus, Emmanuel Wanyonyi in Oslo:
Olympic silver medallist Marco Arop finished third in the men’s 800-metre race at the Diamond League meet in Oslo. He finished in a time of 1:43.33, behind 17-year-old American Cooper Lutkenhaus, who ran a world-leading time of 1:42.08 and Olympic champion Emmanuel Wanyonyi of Kenya.
The 2023 world champion pointed to his improved endurance from two altitude training camps he attended in January and April in Flagstaff, Ariz. With limited speed work in training coming off the injury, the key to Arop’s fast times in Sweden and Norway was running off “a lot” of base training, which involves boosting muscular strength without the extreme stress of peak-season racing.
“Coming back to sea level I felt a lot stronger,” he said. “The missing piece is the speed component. Once [I] have that, I’ll be able to run more like I normally would.”
Middle-distance runner Marco Arop summarizes his performance in Stockholm and Oslo, Norway to open his outdoor season.
Arop said Saturday’s preliminary race will be his first 1,500 in Canada since his first high school meet in Edmonton. He ran it at the Florida Relays in 2023 and 2024 and three times in Grand Slam Track’s inaugural 2025 season, lowering his time at each event to a personal-best 3:35.38 on June 1 in Philadelphia.
“If I can get comfortable in the 1,500, it makes the first 600, 700 of [an 800-metre race] feel a lot easier. I also want to showcase that I’m able to do more than one [distance],” said Arop, who captured an Olympic 800m silver medal two years ago in Paris.
‘He got smarter with each race’
Woods, the head track and field coach at Mississippi State University, cited race tactics for Arop’s growth in the 1,500.
“He got smarter with each race [last season],” Woods said. “He would collect a little more data about himself, about the race, about competitors, and he was able to apply it.”
For the first time, Arop will potentially be faced with the challenge of running multiple 1,500 races in a short time, with only 17 hours between the semifinals and 12:20 p.m. final on Sunday.
“As long as he conserves as much energy as possible and advances [to the final] I’m going to be happy,” Woods said. “And how he recovers, with the nutrition, physio, ice bath and massages [will be important] with a quick turnaround.”
Chris Woods explains what Marco Arop should be mindful of in his 1,500-metre season debut while navigating a short turnaround from the semifinals to the final.
Following nationals, Arop will return home to prepare for the fifth annual Edmonton Athletics Invitational on July 12. He won the men’s 800 in 2022, 2023 and 2024 before missing last year’s competition at Foote Field.
- Arop is expected to return to Diamond League action at the London Athletics Meet on July 18 and in Lausanne, Switzerland (Aug. 21) where he hopes to accumulate enough points to qualify for the Sept. 4-5 Diamond League Final in Brussels.
- From there, it’s the made-for-TV debut of the World Athletics Ultimate Championship, Sept. 11-13 in Budapest, Hungary. The new global championship will bring together Olympic gold medallists, world champions, Diamond League winners and the season’s highest-ranked athletes in a bid to crown track and field’s ultimate performers.
Woods has two other men’s 800 athletes competing for the spotlight in Ottawa: Scarborough, Ont., natives Abdullahi Hassan and Leroy Russell III. The senior men’s preliminaries are Friday at 6:19 p.m. and the final on Saturday at 9:41 p.m.
‘Fearless’ Hassan aims for first 800m title
Hassan, 23, is looking for his first Canadian title at the senior level in six attempts. The first-year pro was second in 2023 and third in his 2019 debut, 0.66 seconds behind Arop, who finished second to Brandon McBride.
“As a 17-year-old he was running against the [senior athletes] and wasn’t afraid of us,” Arop recalled of Hassan, his training partner. “He made a big move and won [his semifinal heat]. He took the lead with 300 metres to go [in the final] and [was in front] with about 150 to the finish]. It takes a lot of guts to make a move like that. It showed he’s fearless, and he still has that edge to him.”
Arop believes his training partner, Abdullahi Hassan, has the ability to run faster and talks about what can be done to reach the next level.
Hassan, who appeared at the 2023 and 2025 world championships, ran a season-best 1:45.08 on May 23 at the L.A. Track Festival in California.
“I think Canada has another rising star in the middle distances,” said Woods, who is also head coach/founder of Starkville-based elite track group Apex Athletics, of which Hassan and Russell III are members. I’m looking forward to him going into this national championships having the training, confidence [and] everything he needs under his belt.
“I think Abdul’s range over the next five or 10 years is going to surprise a lot of people. We’ve [talked] in our group about trying to win the 800 and 1,500 in Ottawa and putting [us] on the map.”
For Russell, this is his fifth nationals as a senior athlete. While he has only appeared in one 800 final, the 24-year-old is coming off a 1:46.66 PB at the Royal City Inferno meet in Guelph, Ont. Last season, Russell was a member of Iowa State’s men’s 4×800 relay team that captured a silver medal at Drake Relays.
For more stories about the experiences of Black Canadians — from anti-Black racism to success stories within the Black community — check out Being Black in Canada, a CBC project Black Canadians can be proud of. You can read more stories here.
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