Kiptum’s death denied sport of his greatness
Sunday was to be the day he would go after the ultimate barrier in Rotterdam. Kenya’s Kelvin Kiptum had streaked across the marathoning world like a comet, winning his first three outings in less than 11 months and shattering the global record last autumn in Chicago.
“We were really looking forward to what he was going to do,” said countryman Geoffrey Kamworor, who was Kiptum’s fellow villager and boyhood idol. “Because his ambition was to run it under two hours.”
Only Eliud Kipchoge had broken the marathon equivalent of the four-minute mile, running 1:59:40 in Vienna in 2019. But since Kipchoge ran by himself behind a pace car with a rotating group of rabbits, his time was ineligible for a world mark.
But after Kiptum went 2:00:35, shattering Kipchoge’s standard by an astonishing 34 seconds, going sub-2:00 on a pancake course in the Netherlands seemed feasible.
“The way he ran in Chicago, it was probably possible given his amazing potential,” reckoned Evans Chebet, who’ll be going after his third consecutive Boston Marathon title on Patriots Day.
That potential was cruelly erased in February when the 24year-old Kiptum died in an automobile accident in western Kenya, leaving behind a wife and two children.
“[He was] an athlete who had a whole life ahead of him to achieve incredible greatness,” said Kipchoge, the two-time Olympic champion whose duel with Kiptum in Paris loomed as one of the highlights of this summer’s Games.
Kiptum already had achieved so much at such a young age in such a short time that he was being compared to the 39-year-old Kipchoge, who’d won 16 of his 20 marathons and twice set the world record.
“Kiptum had run the world record and was obviously a great athlete, but he was definitely different from Kipchoge,” said Chebet. “Maybe Kelvin had more natural talent, especially for the marathon. But he didn’t have the long career and the history and the talent on the track which Eliud showed.”
Kipchoge had won two Olympic medals in the 5,000 meters before switching to 26 miles at 28.
“The marathon is something that takes a lot of experience,” observed Conner Mantz, who’ll be on the US team in Paris. “You look at previous world recordholders like Kipchoge, Paul Tergat, and Haile Gebrselassie. All of them were Olympic or world medalists on the track. It’s pretty incredible that he was able to come into the marathon at such a time and be so dominant without having prior success in anything else.”
Kiptum, the son of a cattle farmer who grew up herding sheep and goats barefoot in Chepkorio, in the high-altitude Rift Valley, took to running on nearby roads because he couldn’t afford to make the 40kilometer trip to Eldoret.
“I had no money to travel to track sessions,” he said.
Kiptum began running half marathons at 13. His marathon breakout came in Valencia in December 2022, where he posted a 2:01:53, the fastest debut ever and the fourth-fastest time in history.
“Valencia was the perfect race,” said Kiptum, who along with Kipchoge and Ethiopia’s Kenenisa Bekele were the only two men to have broken 2:02 at the time. “It was the start of the marathon journey.”
What Kiptum did against a starry field in the London rain four months later captured the world’s attention. He chopped 72 seconds from Kipchoge’s course record in 2:01:25.
“When Kelvin made a move that was crazy pace and there was nothing I could do,” said Kam
woror, the two-time New York City champion who was nearly three minutes behind in second place. “That was just him being himself.”
Kiptum’s second half of 59:45 — a negative split in running parlance — was the swiftest ever. But given Kenya’s ongoing doping issues, the performance also raised international eyebrows.
“My secret is training,” Kiptum insisted. “Not any other thing.”
His load of 170 miles a week was daunting even by elite standards.
“It shows he was on to something special, to have that high a mileage and that amazing speed at the end of a marathon,” said Mantz, whose maximum is closer to 120 miles.
After his London triumph, the only question was whether Kiptum could break the world record and whether he could do it in Chicago, a drag-race course that produces super-fast times.
“You could see in his eyes that he was going to crush it,” said Sam Chelanga, who took the line that day. “But he never wanted to admit it. That’s a dangerous man right there.”
Kiptum’s strategy was catch-me-if-you-can. “He was clearly going to lead from the front,” said American rival Matt McDonald, who’ll be in Boston with Chelanga. “Everybody knew that within the first mile or two. Which is crazy to see in a race like Chicago where the first 5K you’re winding through skyscrapers and there’s huge crowd noise. Sometimes a young guy or somebody who doesn’t have a ton of experience can get a little overhyped too early on.”
But Kiptum opened the throttle at 5K and dashed away from everybody except rookie countryman Daniel Mateiko and the pacemaker.
“When Kelvin injected a completely different pace, I felt it would not have made any sense to go with it,” said Benson Kipruto, who was defending champion. “Going with a world-record pace would have been too great a risk for me.”
So Kiptum ran all but uncontested, and after he dropped Mateiko at 18 miles, he was racing only the clock and the record. At 21 miles, he was 12 seconds off Kipchoge’s pace. At 24 miles, he was 30 seconds under it.
By the time his distant pursuers were approaching the U-turn going into the final stretch, Kiptum was passing them on the other side heading for the line.
“I saw him sprinting and I thought, ‘Man, this is wild,’ ” said Chelanga. “I ran like a 2:08:50 and I was dead. I looked at him and said, ‘Wow, what a stud!’ ”
Though his competitors reckoned that Kiptum was capable of taking down Kipchoge’s world mark, they were stunned by the margin.
“I didn’t foresee him breaking the record by so much so early in his career,” said John Korir, who was more than four minutes behind in fourth. “My reaction was to tell him congratulations and ask him: ‘What can I do to run faster like you?’ ”
Kiptum’s coach fretted that his pupil’s training volume would shorten his career.
“At this point he is in danger of breaking,” Gervais Hakizimana said. “I offered to slow down the pace, but he doesn’t want to. I told him that in five years, he’d be done, that he needed to calm down to last in athletics.”
Yet the immediate goals in Rotterdam and Paris were too enticing for Kiptum to ease up.
“We will never know how long Kelvin would have lasted and if he would have run sub-two hours,” mused Chebet.
On Feb. 11, just five days after his record was ratified, Kiptum lost control of the car he was driving before midnight on the road between Kaptagat and Eldoret. He ran into a ditch and slammed into a tree, killing himself and Hakizimana and injuring a female passenger.
“I saw it on Instagram and thought it was fake news,” McDonald recalled. “Then I saw it in the New York Times an hour later and just couldn’t believe it.”
The fatal accident hit Kenya like a thunderbolt.
“Kiptum was our future,” said president William Ruto, who attended the funeral along with World Athletics president Sebastian Coe.
Kiptum’s untimely death had a profound impact on the country’s road racing community.
“I would never have thought that he actually could have died,” said Kipruto. “It was definitely a difficult situation to accept and digest. So much so that myself and the rest of my training group would not run the next day due to the shock and our sadness. It hit all of us very hard.”
Kiptum’s demise at an age when most elite marathoners’ careers are just underway was a sobering reminder of life’s ephemerality.
“We’re coming to Boston,” said Chelanga. “Let’s not take it for granted. Enjoy it. Have gratitude for the sport that we have and the life that we live.”