Kipchoge’s legacy

“Failure is that person who doesn’t try… I tried to win the third one but it was not my day and that’s how the sport is. You know, if all of us can be positive in life, we’ll go far. In a curtain, there are flowers and weeds and if you concentrate on the weeds, the flowers can’t grow. Let us concentrate on the flowers.”

These were the words of Eliud Kipchoge, considered the GOAT (Greatest of All Time) of marathon after he dropped out of competition in the recent Paris Olympics.

People had expected him to be the first man to win three Olympic gold medals in a row but, alas, it was not meant to be.

After the half marathon mark, he began feeling intense pain on his back and started walking. After all the runners had passed and fans began to walk with him, he gave out his shoes, socks, and singlet.

Many then wondered whether this was a symbolic “hanging up of one’s shoes,” which meant one was already quitting his sport.

I first learned of Kipchoge when I watched the Breaking2 documentary some six years ago.

Breaking2 was a project led by Nike to find out whether, with all the accumulated scientific knowledge about the sport, it was possible to train a human to run a sub two-hour marathon.

Nike tapped three of the top marathon athletes then: Lelisa Desisa of Ethiopia, Zersenay Tadese of Eritrea, and Kipchoge from Kenya, whose personal record at that time was two hours and 03:05 minutes.

The scientists in the Breaking2 project concluded that there were three physiological elements that determine how fast a runner can run.

The first is VO2 max which is one’s maximum oxygen intake. The second is lactate threshold, which is simply the point at which the muscles fatigue and fail. The last is the running economy, which is the amount of energy expended relative to how fast a runner goes.

Of the three athletes who signed up for the project, it was said that Kipchoge ranked highest on all three metrics.

But the clincher, the last piece of the Breaking2 puzzle, was psychological, i.e., the mind game. The exceptional athlete is the one who has the endurance to conquer mental fatigue.

The Breaking2 team also noticed that it was Kipchoge who demonstrated the most sense of calm and mental strength of the three athletes.

Kipchoge ended up “winning” that three-person race in Monza, Italy but missed the sub-two hour target by 26 seconds.

His time of 2:00:25 was the fastest time a person had run the marathon distance but it could not be considered a world record because it was not an official race.

Two years later, Kipchoge finally broke the two-hour barrier by finishing the marathon distance in Vienna, Austria in a time of 1:59:40.2.

This record will unlikely be broken for a long time.

Many would argue that Kipchoge should have ended his career after that shining achievement. But he kept running and snatched another Olympic gold medal in Tokyo in 2020, his second mint since winning in Rio de Janeiro in 2016.

However, at the 2024 Tokyo marathon this year, Kipchoge disappointingly ended at the 10th place which had people wondering whether it was time for the GOAT to pass on the baton to the younger stars of the sport, many of whom are his compatriots.

The marathon career of Kipchoge has spanned 11 years with a 10-race unbeaten streak. He has set the world record twice.

In all of it, he continued to be humble and led an ascetic life.

The GOAT has nothing more to prove. His departure from the sport will mark the end of a golden era.