S E T T I N G T H E T O N E F O R H O W T H E G A M E I S P L A Y E D • F I T Z D A R E S . C O M • S I X T H E D I T I O N , S U M M E R 2 0 1 7 • S T R I C T LY N O U N D E R 18 s
DIARY The day I became a star on the Walk
MAGIC ACT Favela to the Far East
BY BRETT RATNER
BY GRAHAM CUNNINGHAM
LOW LIFE When I took on the Whale and lost
GOOD CALL! Nick Robinson picks ten canny decisions
BY JAMES OSBORNE
The race to break the two-hour barrier By Michael Crawley
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HE MARATHON is a curious distance. Now standardised at 26.2 miles, it originates with the story of Pheidippides, who ran from Marathon to Athens to announce the defeat of the Persians. The accuracy of this legend has since been questioned. Herodotus wrote that Pheidippides actually ran from Athens to Sparta and back – a distance of 150 miles each way. Modern marathon runners will be relieved that it is the former legend that has taken off. Pheidippides presumably ran without GPS assistance, but Google Maps puts Marathon to Athens at a lesser 21 miles. The marathon distance was only formally standardised in 1921, having been extended to accommodate the viewing preferences of the British royal family at the 1908 London Olympics. A race held on the original Marathon-Athens route would also be against IAAF rules, which state that the start and finish must be separated by no more than half the total race distance. Now, with the marathon distance so steeped in legend, an obsession with
running it in less than two hours has developed. There are three projects aiming to run a marathon in 1:59.59 or faster in the near future. The first, the Sub2 project, was launched by sports scientist Yannis Pitsiladis a few years ago, and he was swiftly followed by announcements from Nike and Adidas. Pitsiladis now portrays his project as the underfunded underdog, posting photos on Twitter of his team driving around Addis Ababa in an ancient VW Beetle. Nike’s project, as you might expect, is more cutting-edge, both in terms of its science and its rhetoric. It is working, according to its website, on nothing less than “reaching the future faster, rewriting history and the possibilities of human potential in the process”. It has – of course – a new shoe, as does Adidas. Nike’s is scytheshaped and bulbous – for a project that claims to be equivalent to “putting man on the moon” it certainly looks the part. Adidas posted a photo of its own shoe on its Instagram account after February’s Tokyo Marathon. Wilson Kipsang stands at a busy intersection, an intense look in his
eyes, the shoes he wore in the race (“energy blue”) held up in offering for the camera. A video piece on Wired magazine’s website shows Matthew Nurse, director of Nike’s Sport Research Lab, who tells us that he has shown the new shoe to the brand’s external partners, and that “their best scientifical [sic] term was they’re just magical ”. The emphasis, then, is firmly on the “product”:
These attempts are not about the shoes or thermometers. They are about the transcendent talents. a special Swedish carbohydrate drink in the case of the Sub2 project, shoes and apparel for Nike and Adidas. All this puts the lab, and “technology”, before the athlete. My coach – very much an old-school, tried-and-tested 100-miles-aweek sort of guy – likes to tell a story about one of his contemporaries. In the early days of sports physiology, he underwent some lab testing in the hope of gleaning some useful
information to fine-tune his training. They cut a small slice out of his thigh muscle to do a biopsy, causing him to hobble around for several days afterwards. When he finally got the eagerly anticipated results of the test, he was told that the biopsy “indicated that he could sustain a fast pace for quite a long time”. My coach laughs at this. His friend’s response, apparently, was: “I bloody knew that already!” This is the problem with all three projects: the “science” seems merely to confirm what the athletes already know. Still, it is presented as an accumulation of variables and insights that can make the three-minute difference between the current world record of 2:02.57 and 1:59.59. While the Nike project’s website is all about using the latest technology to move the marathon world record forward, Eliud Kipchoge’s interview with a local Kenyan newspaper made his feelings clear: “This effort,” he said, “won’t require a robot or superman drilled to perfection by scientific faith and medicine, but a good, time-tested human heart, blood and sheer resolve.” →