One of the achievements of this, or any other, year

WHEN Usain Bolt retired last year, the great anxiety for athletics was the lack of likely successors who could inspire a sense of wonder. On the track, this remains a nagging concern, but on the road, Eliud Kipchoge is more than fulfilling his billing as the Neil Armstrong of his sport, gracefully striding into territory where no man has gone before.

The lissom Kenyan’s feat on the streets of Berlin, obliterating the men’s marathon world record by 78 seconds, was the sporting achievement of this or any other year.

In terms of scale, Kipchoge’s time of 2hr 1min 39sec was comparable to Bolt’s dash to glory in the same city nine years earlier, when the sprint legend lowered his own record from 9.69 to 9.58, or Bob Beamon’s gravity-defying long jump of 8.90 metres in 1968.

Usually, incursions on a world record are made by slender margins, as the limits of human physiology are approached. But with a run of the eeriest poise and control, Kipchoge tipped such logic on its head, eating up the asphalt to make Dennis Kimetto’s previous benchmark of 2:02.57 look positively pedestrian.

One hesitates to say it is a record that will stand for decades, if only because Kipchoge looks capable, at 33, of setting whatever time he chooses. The dream of a sub-2hr marathon, once deemed a biological impossibility, appears within his gift.

There are two ways of chasing history over such a fearsome distance. Either the would-be record-breaker sets off at a prodigious clip and then hangs on for dear life in the closing stages, or he attempts the even more fiendish task of finishing stronger than he starts.

Kipchoge, such an elegant athlete, did it the hard way, registering the fabled ‘negative splits’, running the first half of his marathon in 61min 6sec and the second in a barely believable 60min 33sec, without any pacemakers for help.

At one point, Kipchoge missed his water bottle stop, but somehow only increased his cadence, gliding through the final 15km in a mere 43 minutes.

A few spectators tried a game of keeping up with him and needed to sprint at full pelt to do so. To appreciate just how fast he was going, consider this: the fastest official parkrun time for 5km anywhere in Britain over the weekend was 14:52. Kipchoge’s average 5km pace throughout a 42km race stood at 14:24.

It was a pity, all told, that athletics did not take the opportunity to broadcast such a giddying moment to a wider audience.

As Kipchoge laid waste to the record book, there was not a single terrestrial or cable outlet broadcasting it, with any viewers forced instead to follow a shaky Kenyan feed online.

There were, understandably, some raised eyebrows that he could carve so much out of Kimetto’s time in one fell swoop.

For what it is worth, Kipchoge has always been outspoken against the doping cases that have stalked his Kenyan homeland, and has continued to live humbly despite the millions made from his sponsorship by Nike. This was one day, perhaps, when the awe deserved to outweigh the suspicion. (© Daily Telegraph, London)