Kelvin Kiptum was the marathon’s shooting star

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The life of one of the brightest young stars in all of Olympic sports was cut horribly short on Sunday when marathon world-record holder Kelvin Kiptum died in a car crash in his native Kenya.

Police said Kiptum, 24, lost control of the car he was driving at around 11 p.m. local time and veered off the road into a ditch before striking a tree. Kiptum’s coach, Gervais Hakizimana, was also killed in the wreck, which occurred in the high-altitude region of southwest Kenya where many top distance runners train. Kiptum was born and raised in the area and continued to live there with his wife and two young children.

As Kiptum’s family, friends and country wrestle with his sudden death, the distance-running world is left to wonder what might have been.

Kiptum was just 23 — unusually young for a top marathoner — when he shattered fellow Kenyan Eliud Kipchoge’s world record by a stunning 34 seconds at last October’s Chicago Marathon. That was just the third (and, it turned out, last) marathon for Kiptum, and they all rank among the seven fastest of all time.

Kiptum won his marathon debut in Valencia, Spain in late 2022 in a head-turning 2:01:53. He took last April’s London Marathon in 2:01:25 (at the time, the second-fastest record-eligible marathon ever) for the first of his two majors titles. Less than six months later, Kiptum destroyed Kipchoge’s world record under ideal conditions in Chicago, where his time of 2:00:35 put him tantalizingly close to the mythical two-hour barrier.

Since marathon is a niche sport, perhaps it’s worth pausing here to put these times in context. Kiptum’s world record of 2:00:35 in the 42.195-kilometre distance equates to an average pace of about 2:51 per kilometre. To understand how fast that is, try running just one kilometre in that amount of time. The vast majority of people can’t. Now imagine doing it 42 times in a row.

The fact that Kiptum looked relatively fresh when he crossed the finish line in Chicago, and that no one was anywhere close enough to push him (runner-up Benson Kipruto finished about 3½ minutes back), sparked the running community’s imagination. Considering the latest advancements in carbon-plated shoe technology, it seemed likely — maybe even inevitable — that Kiptum would become the first person to run a legal marathon in under two hours.

In 2019, Kipchoge covered the distance in 1:59:40 in a highly choreographed event in Vienna, where his unsanctioned advantages included a rotating group of 41 wind-blocking pacesetters and an electric pace car that projected green laser beams on the road to guide them. But Kiptum sounded poised to run the first legitimate sub-two-hour marathon as soon as this April in Rotterdam, saying he planned to “try at least to beat my world record” on the Dutch city’s flat course. If the conditions were right, Kiptum added, “I will get close to the sub-two barrier, so why not aim to break it? That might look ambitious, but I’m not afraid of setting these kinds of goals. There’s no limit to human energy.”

Kiptum’s untimely death not only robbed the world of its best chance to see someone break two hours in the near future, it also took away the possibility of an unforgettable showdown between Kiptum and Kipchoge at this summer’s Olympics in Paris.

Kenya has not yet announced who from its bottomless supply of elite road runners will fill the country’s three spots in the men’s marathon. But Kiptum was expected to challenge Kipchoge, the 39-year-old GOAT who owns five of the 10 fastest times in history and is trying to become the first person ever to win three consecutive Olympic marathon titles.

Given those stakes, a battle for Olympic gold between the two fastest marathoners of all time in one of the world’s great cities could have propelled the sport into the mainstream spotlight. It also had the potential to become one of the greatest marathon showdowns ever — maybe even a modern version of the epic Duel in the Sun between Alberto Salazar and Dick Beardsley in the 1982 Boston Marathon.

Now, in the blink of an eye, that possibility is gone. And so is the most exciting young distance runner the world has seen in quite some time.

When I heard about Kiptum’s and Hakizimana’s death on Sunday night, I immediately thought about a story I read after the Chicago Marathon in which the coach detailed his star runner’s mind-boggling training regimen. Whereas, according to Hakizimana, Kipchoge typically runs between 180 and 220 kilometres a week, Kiptum logs 250-280 and sometimes exceeds 300 km. Unlike most runners, Kiptum doesn’t schedule in weekly “rest” days, which for Kipchoge means doing only one training session on Sundays instead of the usual two-a-days. “We rest when [Kiptum] gets tired,” Hakizimana said. “If for a month he doesn’t show signs of fatigue or pain, we continue.”

Again, perhaps I can help with some context here. I also ran last year’s Chicago Marathon, as an age-group qualifier. Kiptum beat me by about an hour and 17 minutes, but I’d say that qualifying for one of the six world majors shows that I take running seriously (at least for a guy with a full-time job and a family). My training peaked at about 60 km per week — a fifth of what Kiptum did. “All he does is run, eat, sleep,” Hakizimana said.

That’s a brutal workload — even by the standards of elite marathoners, who are essentially professional pain tolerators. But Hakizimana said Kiptum insisted on it, ignoring his coach’s warnings that it would shorten his career. He wanted to chase greatness — longevity be damned. “I told him that in five years he would be done,” Hakizimana said. “That he must calm down to last in athletics.”

As it turned out, Kiptum was indeed a shooting star — in a far more tragic way than anyone could have imagined.