Three years ago, Matan Ivri's talent was reading a compass and a contour map at speed through Israeli forests, not running a fast lap of a track. Today, at 24, he owns the Israeli national records in the 1,500m, the mile and the 3,000m, and he is chasing a place on the start line at the Los Angeles Olympics in 2028.
Ivri's route into distance running began, of all places, in the sport of orienteering. He was Israel's national orienteering champion until around 2023, navigating unmarked terrain under time pressure — a discipline that demands, as he has put it, high-stakes decisions made on the move. He credits those years with building the composure that now carries him through the closing laps of a championship final.
One of the formative moments of his teenage years came at the 2019 European Orienteering Championships in Belarus, when Ivri, not yet 17, stood by the podium as Israel's flag went up to mark a sixth-place team finish on the continent — a result he still counts among his proudest as a competitor, from a sport most Israeli sports fans barely follow.
It was only when he began running to build fitness for orienteering that he discovered he had a different, and much rarer, gift. "I didn't know I had this," he has said of the speed that emerged once he put down the map and picked up spikes.
The transition has been startlingly fast. This year alone, Ivri has rewritten the Israeli 1,500m record eight times, most recently clocking 3:34.51 in Belgium on July 11 — a mark that also made him the first Israeli to dip under 3:40 for the distance.
He has done the same across the middle-distance card: a national record of 7:43.88 for 3,000m set in February, and a mile time inside four minutes that made him the first Israeli in history to break that barrier, a landmark long treated as a benchmark of serious distance-running class.
In June, Ivri took his form to the biggest stage of American college athletics, finishing fifth in the 1,500m final at the NCAA Outdoor Championships in Eugene, Oregon, in 3:37.41 — behind winner Simeon Birnbaum of Oregon — and earning First-Team All-America honors, a rare distinction for an Israeli track athlete.
All of this has unfolded at the University of Wisconsin, where Ivri trains with the Badgers on a $100,000 athletic scholarship while studying computer science and making the Dean's List. He has spoken of treating both his training and his coursework with the same analytical precision, as interlocking systems to be optimized rather than separate pursuits.
He has not strayed far from his roots. Ivri grew up in the Galilee and still trains, in spirit, with his first club, Hapoel Emek Hefer, texting his early coach and mentor Amir Ramon after every race he runs on American soil.
The next test comes fast: the European Athletics Championships open in Birmingham on August 10, and Ivri is aiming to hit the qualifying standard of around 3:33.50 to make the field — a mark just over a second inside his current personal best.
Beyond Birmingham sits the real target. Ivri has spoken of the Los Angeles Olympics in 2028 not as a distant dream but as an active plan, one built race by race, second by second, on a Wisconsin track thousands of kilometers from the forests where his athletic career actually began.
Israeli distance running has rarely produced a genuine international contender; the sport has historically been a weak link in the country's Olympic program. Ivri's rapid rise, still just three years removed from his final orienteering course, has made him one of the most closely watched young Israeli athletes heading into the run-up to LA 2028.
