on race day and couldn’t fall back asleep. In the film, we learn that Kipchoge woke up at 2 A.M. Imagine having 41 of the best runners in the world flown in for the sole purpose of pacing you to glory, and a vast team of logistics savants dedicating years of planning to help you succeed on the day. Not just the fact that he ran 26 consecutive miles at 4:34 pace, but the fact that he was able to do it under an unfathomable level of pressure where dropping out really wasn’t an option. No matter how artificially optimized the conditions may have been, no sane person would deny that what Kipchoge did in Vienna was astonishing. To be fair, the question of whether the two-hour barrier can only be broken in an official world-record eligible race is ultimately far less interesting than the phenomenon of Kipchoge himself.
Borrowing a motif from the original, Nike-sponsored Breaking2 project, The Last Milestone opens with a reference to Neil Armstrong’s moon landing, lest you had any doubt about the significance of Kipchoge’s achievement. Whether this performance did, in fact, constitute the “last milestone” in professional athletics, or deviated too much from the standard marathon format to earn such a distinction, remains up for debate-although not according to this film. The film is directed by Jake Scott and offers a behind-the-scenes look at the Ineos 1:59 Challenge, where Kipchoge, flanked by a rotating crew of pacemakers and shod in the latest iteration of Nike super shoes, clocked 1:59:40 for 26.2 miles in Vienna and became the first human to break the two-hour barrier. That’s the central dilemma for Kipchoge: The Last Milestone, a new documentary that will be available to stream on multiple platforms in the United States on August 24. By the time he trounced his competition at this summer’s Games, Kipchoge’s GOAT status was already long affirmed, prompting LetsRun to keep things economical with their headline: “The Greatest Ever x2.” When it comes to burnishing the Kipchoge legend, is there anything left to say? A sub two-hour marathon one year later that wasn’t a race so much as a display of Platonic perfection.
An absurd new world record-2:01:39-set in 2018 in Berlin. Even before his victory in Sapporo, the 36-year-old Kenyan had a marathon resume that defied comprehension: 12 victories in 14 starts. Earlier this month, after Eliud Kipchoge defended his Olympic title, it felt like we’d finally run out of superlatives for the most accomplished marathoner in history.
0 kommentar(er)
