Opinion | Eliud Kipchoge and Brigid Kosgei marathon records make it clear no sporting achievement is impossible to beat
- Kenyan runner becomes first to go the distance in less than two hours after making history in Vienna
- Compatriot smashes women’s record at Chicago Marathon as we ask what’s next
Eliud Kipchoge has written himself into the record books. Again.
The fastest man in the marathon has now become the first to do the distance in under two hours. That’s a pace of 17 seconds for every 100m – for the full 42.195 kilometres.
It’s been likened to the moon landing and Roger Bannister’s breaking of the four-minute mile for human achievements.
Kipchoge had come close before. He was 25 seconds off two hours in 2017 at Nike’s Breaking 2 event at Italy’s Formula One course at Monza. It was a similar set-up on Saturday in Vienna for the Ineos 1:59 Challenge event, backed by British billionaire Jim Ratcliffe. The fact that everything, down to the weather and rotating pacemakers, was designed to aid Kipchoge’s quest takes nothing away from this as an achievement.
At the first Olympics in 1896, only one marathon runner came in quicker than three hours and that was a shorter course. Since American Johnny Hayes ran 2:55:18 in 1908, times have fallen fast. By the late 1960s, runners were regularly beating 2:10 and the East Africans have taken it to a whole new level since the turn of the century. Kenya’s Paul Tergat ran the first sub-2:05 marathon in Berlin in 2003 and the city has been the scene for every subsequent record. Ethiopia’s Haile Gebrselassie set the next two there in 2007 and then in 2008 when he went sub-2:04, before the Kenyans really got going this decade.
