No, Kelvin Kiptum Is Not the Next Kipchoge

This article originally appeared on Outside

Last week, Runner's World published a profile on Molly Seidel, just in time for her comeback race at the Chicago Marathon. The piece included a lot of new insight into Seidel's physical and mental struggles that came in the wake of her dizzying ascent to stardom after she unexpectedly won a bronze medal in the marathon at the Tokyo Olympics. At one point, Seidel also offers her two cents on the eternal question of how her sport can hope to engage audiences. For people to care, Seidel suggests, athletes have to do more than run fast. They need to have a certain emotional resonance. This is not a particularly radical take, but it's one worth keeping in mind in a sport where the significance of elite performance is so often boiled down to numbers on a clock. While it's possible to be moved by the mere fact of witnessing physical genius in action, even the most audacious record needs some kind of narrative bolstering. "I hate conversations like, 'Who's the GOAT?'" Seidel says in the Runner's World piece. "Who fucking cares? Who's got the story that's going to get people excited?"

The sentiment came to mind as I watched Kelvin Kiptum break Eliud Kipchoge's world record in Chicago over the weekend. Competing in only his third marathon, the 23-year-old Kiptum ran 2:00:35 to improve on Kipchoge's mark of 2:01:09. Even before his race on Sunday, Kiptum had been touted as the next Kipchoge, ever since he announced himself on the pro scene with the fastest-ever marathon debut (2:01:53) in Valencia last December. Now that he officially has the record, the comparisons are only going to proliferate. But talk of Kiptum as heir apparent feels premature. This isn't so much because Kiptum has yet to replicate Kipchoge's otherworldly consistency over a decade of racing (16 wins in 19 marathon starts), but rather because the Kipchoge phenomenon can only partially be attributed to his athletic success. It was always the broader narrative, the story, about the hyper-disciplined ascetic who speaks like a self-help guru that made Kipchoge the most popular marathoner ever. Even if you are one of those people who find the messianic vibes of the Kipchoge persona rather annoying or contrived, it's impossible to deny that the reason for his widespread appeal goes beyond the fact that he runs a fast marathon twice a year.

Back to Kiptum. With apologies to Molly Seidel, Kiptum's performance on Sunday was certainly GOAT-worthy. For the second time in his still nascent marathon career, Kiptum ran the back half of the race in under 60 minutes. What's more, he did it with minimal help; the pacemakers were out of their depth early on and Kiptum's only competitor, Kenya's Daniel Mateiko, was already hanging on for dear life at the halfway mark. (Mateiko would drop out a few miles later.) This meant that Kiptum was running solo over the final quarter of the race when he reeled off his fast splits of the day. Over the last six miles, Kiptum's average speed was right around 4:30 minutes per mile--a pace that converts to a 1:58:00 marathon. Assuming that Kiptum doesn't get injured, or busted for doping, a sub-two-hour marathon seems like a foregone conclusion.

When Kiptum does inevitably break that mythic barrier in an actual race, I wonder whether the feat will really be more celebrated than when Kipchoge ran 1:59:40 at the world's most expensive time trial in 2019. Say what you will about the overly manufactured nature of the Ineos 1:59 Challenge and its Breaking2 predecessor, but both of these events were, perhaps above all else, masterful achievements of narrative. Remember Kipchoge describing the sub-two-hour marathon as the equivalent of putting a man on the moon?

At the press conference after his race in Chicago, Kiptum maintained that at no point did he feel any pain or discomfort. It would have been easy to brush off this absurd statement as a bit of post-facto gamesmanship, if it weren't for the fact that his otherworldly splits seemed to affirm that he did indeed feel good in the closing stages of the race. Letsrun's Jonathan Gault referred to the remark as "galling." It's hard to disagree. Since I've agonized through my share of marathons, albeit at a hair slower than world record pace, I couldn't help but feel mild resentment at Kiptum's blase debrief after producing the fastest time ever. Well then why didn't you run faster, tough guy? At least Kipchoge, who has also seemed impervious to fatigue, has his infamous late race smile of pain.

Kiptum's account of his experience in Chicago stood in stark contrast to that of Sifan Hassan, the 30-year-old Dutch-Ethiopian who won the women's race in 2:13:44--a time that would have been a world record, were it not for Tigst Assefa's ridiculous 2:11:53 two weeks ago in Berlin. Like Kiptum, Hassan is a relative newcomer to the marathon who has immediately upended the conventional wisdom about what is supposed to be possible for the distance. In April, Hassan ran her debut in London and produced an improbable, come-from-behind victory against what was widely touted as the most formidable women's field ever assembled. Rather than disappearing into training mode like every other world-class marathoner, she had a busy summer of competing on the track, culminating at the World Championships in Budapest where she contested in three different events and medalled in two of them. A mere six weeks later, she rolled up in Chicago and ran the second-fastest marathon ever. Now that's a story. At least Hassan had the decency to admit that Chicago felt kind of hard: "Today it was so painful, I was, like, I'm not going to run the marathon ever again," Hassan said after the race.

It's safe to assume that Hassan's relationship to pain--her ability to override and master it--is very different from yours and mine. Nonetheless, her aw-shucks demeanor, combined with her unprecedented ability, has a beguiling sort of charm. As with Kiptum, one would be a fool to dismiss the possibility that Hassan's feats are too good to be true. But at least her rise into the distance running stratosphere has been gradual, rather than meteoric--she won her first major title a decade ago at the U23 European Cross Country Championships--which is usually a good sign. Who knows? Maybe Hassan's disarming self-deprecations are all just an act--a way to catch her opponents off guard, or to win the adulation of running media saps. But, so far at least, it's working for me.

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