On August 10th, in the shadow of Paris’s Hotel de Ville, Eliud Kipchoge will toe the starting line for his third, and likely final, Olympic marathon. He’ll do so as the only man to break the two-hour barrier for the distance, in a much-lauded (if unofficial) effort in Vienna nearly five years ago. He’ll bring with him perhaps the most decorated resume in marathon history: He won the first marathon he entered, in 2013, lost his second, and then won 15 of the next 18 over the course of the following decade. (A recent stretch—two wins, an eighth-place finish in Boston, and a 10th in Tokyo—qualifies, for him alone, as a slump.)
In that span, Kipchoge became something like the Yoda of long-distance running: an even-keeled, koan-dispensing icon with a stated interest in sharing the gift of running as widely as possible, and in transcending his sport. Thanks, especially, to his two-hour triumph, he can plausibly claim to have done both.
When he lines up in Paris, Kipchoge will be wearing a pair of the supershoes—Nike Alphafly 3s, in this case—that have revolutionized the sport at all levels of competition, and that Kipchoge himself has been unusually involved in developing. You have probably seen sneakers like these; if you have recently set a long-distance PR, you probably did so while wearing them, or a pair indebted to their design. The concept is relatively simple: the shoes sit atop a large, wedge-shaped foam midsole wrapped around a carbon-fiber plate; the plate and foam act like a spring, returning to the runner more energy than the typical shoe would. Remarkably, they really, really work. You can basically divide the history of distance running into pre- and post-supershoe eras.
One afternoon in Paris earlier this spring, Kipchoge and I met to talk about his unparalleled running career, and the unique role the world’s largest athletic company has played in it. We sat in a warm room on the second floor of the city’s 19th-century stock exchange, which Nike had taken over and transformed for a media junket teasing their Olympics initiatives. Kipchoge wore an olive green Jordan Brand sweatsuit and black Jordan slides. In person, he exudes significant gravity despite his slight 115 pound frame. His eyes, almost watery, rarely broke contact.
The first shoe Eliud Kipchoge noticed as a kid growing up in Kenya, he told me, wasn’t a running shoe at all. Instead, it was a pair of Jordans. “Jordan is a big, big brand in Kenya,” he said, “associated with the name of the basketball player and the ability of the shoe, the beauty of the shoe.” Kipchoge was born in 1984, the same year Michael Jordan entered the NBA. When I asked what it was he found special about MJ, he explained that it was less about what Jordan did on the court than the way he loomed large off of it, even after—especially after—his career ended. “It seemed like Jordan, when he exited the sport…life actually continues. That’s what I admire most: that we need to exit the sport and still live in the life of sport. Still tell a friend and the friend to tell a friend about sport, and live in a sporting way, and in a sporting life. That’s what I admire from Michael Jordan.”
