Kipchoge delivers a historic sales pitch for fancy kit
By showcasing new trainers, the record run proves progress depends on brand support, writes Jim White
The aim was to convince park runners to fork out for new footwear
On Sunday, I sloshed through a biblical downpour to complete the Oxford half-marathon. Despite the horrible conditions, my time was only a few seconds slower than Eliud Kipchoge had managed in Vienna the day before. Although, if you are being pernickety, it would be fair to point out that the Kenyan had covered twice the distance in that time.
One thing we can be sure about following Kipchoge’s astonishing achievement is that when the Oxford Half takes place next October, a good proportion of the 10,000 runners will be stepping out in a pair of the running shoes he was wearing in his mind-boggling sub two-hour sprint.
With heels so huge and inflated they look as though someone has taken a bicycle pump to the design, they are the most extraordinary items. Built to push a runner up on to their toes, the shoes are said to have given Kipchoge the extra added impetus to break the impossible two-hour marathon mark. It was his kit that made the difference.
Or at least that is what the manufacturer would like us to believe. Nike did not invest untold millions of dollars in supporting Kipchoge’s record-busting effort for the simple glory of achievement. It did it to convince us wheezing park runners that, if we fork out a couple of hundred quid for their fancy-dan footwear, we can knock a few seconds off our personal best.
This was recordbreaking as a sales device – and it has become the engine of progress across the sporting landscape: sporting records have become things on which commercial opportunity now hangs.
Golf clubs with heads of elephantine scale, aerodynamically engineered footballs that dip and swerve like boomerangs, swimming costumes that propel you through the water with dolphin-like prowess: the insistence of modern record-breaking is that the technology involved offers the rest of us a short cut to improvement. No need to waste hours perfecting your swing on the golf range when you can buy a ball that has been designed to fly further than a swallow’s migratory route even when hit by a novice.
Indeed, such was the contrived nature of Kipchoge’s effort, it has not been recognised as a genuine record. The rocket-propelled heels, the plethora of pacemakers, the fact there were no other competitors in contention: all of this has precluded the time being recorded in the annals of marathon history.
Yet these days it is impossible to think of a sport in which technology has not assisted record-breaking. Australian tennis player Sam Groth would have not have hit a serve at 163mph if, instead of a beast with tungsten strings and a sweet spot the size of Wales, he had been obliged to use one of the wooden-framed rackets with which Bjorn Borg used to play.
Francois Pervis would have been pushed to complete the 1km time trial in 56.303 seconds were he aboard the sort of bicycle World Championship competitors rode in the Sixties and Seventies. And Hicham El Guerrouj would have been unlikely to have completed a mile in 3min 43.13sec had he been required to sport the same shoes Sir Roger Bannister wore when he dashed round the Iffley Road track in Oxford in under four minutes.
Mind, Bannister himself was no stranger to technology. In his long search to break the four-minute mile barrier, he was a pioneer of using sports science to seek out precious advantage. His shoes may now look naive in comparison to Kipchoge’s galoshes, but they were state-of-the-art at the time. And, just like the Kenyan, he deftly employed pacemakers on his record-breaking run.
Perhaps these days the only technology-free approach to recordbreaking in sport can be found in gymnastics. Unless she did it on a squishy new aerodynamic mat that offered added spring, Simone Biles completed her pioneering triple double spin in bare feet, the same fundamental equipment as Nadia Comaneci used to leap her way to glory four decades ago.
Which makes you wonder: following Biles’s record, what will amateur gymnasts do to make themselves leap higher? Surely they will not be required to rely solely on their innate ability, will they?