Sponsors may vary. A Coros watch on his wrist, a glucose monitor glued to his arm but for Eliud Kipchoge simple pen and paper will always prevail.
On 3 March 2024, the double Olympic champion passed the red bricks of one of the world’s most iconic train stations. Four minutes 34 seconds had elapsed since Benson Kipruto broke the tape at the 17th edition of the Tokyo marathon. Three other Kenyans had already followed Kipruto home.
Cap still on, the double Olympic champion looked to the ground, doing his best to avoid the eyes of a horde of photographers never so eager for a shot of a man so far down the field.
Hide he could not from the unavoidable fact he had just had his lowest race finish in almost 14 years.
When the noise died down, the door to his hotel shut and eventually he was left alone 11,000 km from home, Kipchoge picked up his pen and running diary. A one word note:
“10th”.
Tokyo torment
We now know the context of that Toyko defeat. Kipchoge says he barely slept in the two days before he took to the streets of the Japanese capital.
After the mysterious death of Kelvin Kiptum, Internet voices had kept Kipchoge central to their conspiracies. Death threats on him, on his family. Of course that doesn’t negate what we saw, a man exhausted and, to his critics, an ageing shadow of his former best, but there’s more to that Tokyo day than a single number.
In May I sat down in the garden of the Global Sports Communication Camp he has called home for over 20 years. Kipchoge sat in front, arms outstretched on a bench. He leaned back, completing the relaxed image but his words portrayed a different emotion.
It’s difficult in that environment not to find yourself in your own little bubble, insulated from an outside world shut out at the compound’s gates. Occasionally, however, noises seep in, or rather they don’t.
Since taking the Olympic Marathon title in 2016, the media has knocked incessantly at Kipchoge’s door, never more so than after the INEOS 1:59 challenge in 2019. Quote after quote packaged up and consumed by a public voracious for an insight into this humble man with record-breaking legs.
Eyes elsewhere
Things have started to change. Boston in 2023 showed the first chink in the armour, a fifth Berlin Marathon triumph in the autumn providing a slight patch, before Tokyo seemed to shatter it completely.
And just as it did a new marathon star emerged just kilometres from his home. Attention started to drift elsewhere.
Sitting in the garden, I got the impression Kipchoge had noticed that change. Those same journalists who had extolled his virtues, on and off the roads, now were the ones declaring his end.
An athlete, who had the previous day been confirmed in the Kenya team, bidding for an unprecedented third Olympic gold. The normally gracious diplomat had a touch of the irritable, as if finally he had grown tired of everything unnecessary to the pursuit of winning again.
A friendship with Kenyan teammate Benson Kipruto?
“What’s a friend?” Kipchoge replied.
Any memories of the day his whole life changed with that first world title in 2003 in the Stade de France?
“I don’t know, I can’t remember.”
All fluff, all emotion, parked to the side.
No distractions
It’s a tired saying that we learn more in defeat than we ever do in victory but even at 39 it appears Kipchoge’s still a student.
In 2022 I visited him at a similar time of year. Then discussion had centred on legacy.
“I started and made history so we want other people to also make history.” He sat back and said, giving off the confidence that his impact, his legacy would stand the test of time, regardless of what came next.
But the year that’s followed seems to have changed that disposition.
Put to the side by the media, even criticised by his own compatriots, who have at times thought he believes himself bigger than his homeland, Kipchoge has been reminded that the brutality of sport means the loudest voice heads to the fastest feet.
Win or lose, everything else follows.
Process above all
Never in his whole career, Kipchoge states, has he been lost in the process. But, I’d argue, he has been distracted. Where in 2022 he talked about legacy, fast-forward to 2023 and all he repeats is process.
“I have no control with what has actually happened. I have control of what I am doing now. I have time to plan for tomorrow.”
Somewhere along the way, like the external noises that creep into the compound, the pressure of the last 18 months, in and out of athletics, have seen Kipchoge misstep.
A slight deviation from that unemotional consistent path that has brought with it Olympic golds and world records. The incessant no-thrills boredom that lay the foundations for everything else.
At the very highest level, those small differences add up.
Not done yet
Coach Patrick Sang says he can notice it from slight variations to the way his athletes land their feet. External factors play their part, even if everything else stays the same:
“considering what happened, and what was said, anybody would be in that position but nobody is always at the bottom. If things push you in life to the bottom, you always find a natural way of coming back. I’m hoping and I’m seeing he’s formed a natural way of coming back.”
During our conversation with Sang’s athlete, Kipchoge at times slips back into the model interviewee we’re used to seeing. A few snippets of the postcard quotes and motivational motifs but for the most part he seems like he’s playing a game.
Uninterested in wasting time on anything other than the necessary, don’t confuse the change with insecurity.
“The moment I lose confidence is the moment I don’t go.” He is keen to remind us.
This is a burnt Kipchoge, unloved, ignored but dangerous. Win in Paris and he’s adamant, one simple word will enter his diary.
“First.”
A full-length interview with Eliud Kipchoge will appear in July’s Athletics Weekly Olympic Special, available in all good retailers.
