RACE INTO HISTORY
Four-and-a-half minutes per mile, every mile, for 26 miles. Superhuman challenge facing this runner as he bids to...
NEXT weekend, in a public park in Vienna, Kenyan runner Eliud Kipchoge will attempt to write his name into long-distance running folklore by doing what no one has ever done — run a marathon in under two hours.
Two years after failing by just 25 seconds to dip inside two hours, the 34- year- old world record holder is ready to have another crack at marathon-running history.
Kipchoge, who has already run the fastest legal time in history, has claimed success would be comparable to putting a man on the moon or scaling Everest.
And no expense has been spared in his bid for immortality with British billionaire Jim Ratcliffe’s company Ineos bankrolling this remarkable assault on the record books.
Comparisons with Sir Roger Bannister’s run that broke the four-minute mile are obvious but critics say Saturday’s event in Austria is simply too contrived and there is no doubt that this is a record attempt like no other.
Kipchoge’s team have hand-picked an elite group of athletes who have been drilled to precisely pace him all the way to the line.
Cyclists will draw alongside Kipchoge at pre- determined intervals to ensure he is rehydrated and he will also be running in a controversial brand of shoe. Athletics governing body, the IAAF, will not recognise the time and Professor Ross Tucker, a respected South African sports scientist, has described it as getting man to the moon by taking gravity out of the equation.
‘It would be the same as breaking the high jump record [set in 1993 by Cuba’s Javier Sotomayor at a height of 2.45m] on Mars where there is less gravity,’ he added.
For Kipchoge, though, this has been an obsession for two years and his team hope they have learned from his previous tilt at breaking the two-hour mark in Monza in 2017 when the four-time London Marathon winner stopped the clock at two hours, 25 seconds.