Is Eliud Kipchoge on a collision course with Kelvin Kiptum? MAJORS looks at the likelihood of the world’s two fastest marathon runners going head to head

WORDS: Danny Coyle

What do we truly remember the greatest sportsmen and women for? 

Times posted and medals won will always live on in the pages of record.  

But in the memory banks of the watching millions, more often than not, it’s the titanic battles the very best endured against their fiercest rivals that define their greatness. 

In boxing, Muhammad Ali wouldn’t be the fabled legend he is without his Rumble in the Jungle or Thriller in Manilla, against George Foreman and Joe Frazier respectively. The average fan on the street can reel off those fights faster than they can his career win/loss record. 

Larry Bird and Magic Johnson’s rivalry elevated them, and the sport of basketball, to an entirely new level in terms of the quality of the games and the attention the sport garnered as a result of their back-and-forth tussles.  

Even in the statistically obsessed world of American sport, it wasn’t their shot percentages that the public recall, but the contrast in culture, style and substance between the two men and their teams that made them greater than the sum of their numbers. 

Would Messi be as great without Ronaldo’s relentless pursuit of his ascent to the title of best in the world? Probably not. It’s the presence of that polar opposite that serves to define the pair. 

And in athletics, the great Daley Thompson was driven to heights few have ever reached in the decathlon thanks to his relentless desire to beat his German counterpart Juergen Hingsen. Can you name any of the personal bests from the ten events they dominated? No. The Thompson/Hingsen animus is the story we call to mind. 

Dance partners. The best on the planet have always had at least one. Which brings us to the great Eliud Kipchoge.  

Are we going to see him face up to the first athlete with the first genuine chance of going stride for stride with him? 

When Kelvin Kiptum relinquished his place in the Kenyan World Championship team this summer, tongues began to wag that he might be lining up against the great man somewhere on the fall Majors circuit.  

Kiptum, the unknown newcomer in 2022, blazed his way around the streets of Valencia in 2:01:53 last year, then pitched up in London and ran 2:01:25, registering an eye-watering 59 minutes and 45 seconds for his second half in April.  

It wasn’t to be. Kipchoge is going to Berlin, Kiptum is going to Chicago, but the conversation brought into focus the notion that these two will meet sooner rather than later. It can take a while for the stars to align.  

Followers of boxing went gray waiting for a contest to be made between Floyd Mayweather and Manny Pacquiao, while hopes of one day telling the grandchildren about the moment Anthony Joshua stepped into the same ring as Tyson Fury have been fostered for longer than it took Andy Duphrane to tunnel his way out of Shawshank prison.  

It’s the hope that kills you, sometimes. At least Duphrane made it. 

In marathon running, we hoped and waited for Kipchoge vs Kenenisa Bekele, and had a near miss in 2020 when they were both announced for the London Marathon.  

In 2019 the great Ethiopian had come two seconds away from the then-world record set by Kipchoge a year earlier in Berlin. Bekele ran 2:01:41 on the same roads, becoming the second man to breach 2:02:00 on a record-eligible course. The tantalizing prospect of a duel between the two was set for the following spring.  

Then came the pandemic, a delay, and a rescheduled clash of the titans for October 2020.  

They shared a covid-restricted athlete hideaway in the English countryside ahead of the race on closed-off, eerily quiet roads, as though fate had conspired to set a stage where the focus would be uniquely trained on the two great men in a race stripped of its usual throng of humanity and heart-rending stories. And then it was gone.  

Bekele withdrew through injury just days before the race and Kipchoge labored home in eighth on a miserable, wet morning.  

Their paths have not crossed since.  

The hope, now, is that the double Olympic champion, four-time AbbottWMM Series champion and only man to stop a clock before it struck two hours for 26.2 miles, will come up against the only other man to break 2:01:30 in a ratified marathon. 

Kipchoge has broken two world records, won Berlin three times, won London four times and also has wins in Chicago and Tokyo on his CV. A bad day for him in Boston in April sees him return to the familiar roads of the German capital where he set those record times.  

The world will be watching to see if he can recover from his set-back to reassert his status as No. 1. He has been customarily graceful in his only public comment about his countryman’s performances. When asked if the younger man might be the one to attack his current world record, he said: “I always say records are meant to be broken and I hope Kiptum does that in the near future. He is a man with a big heart.”  

With Kiptum now confirmed for the Bank of America Chicago Marathon, it very much feels like this season will be the phoney war before a potential match-up in 2024, whether that’s in an AbbottWMM race or on the Parisian Olympic course. 

It’s a contest we need to see, and it has all the ingredients of a classic, but we’ve been here before, hoping and waiting for the race that could define the era. 

Kipchoge’s greatness is currently constructed of his tussles with the clock, and they are already the stuff of legend in their own right.

But a battle with an athlete who can claim to hold a candle to him? that would be a contest to live with the best duels sport has ever seen.

It’s the hope that kills you. We’ll nurture it gently.