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.”
Kipchoge was in his marathoning prime just as the supershoe revolution hit the running world, and he’s worked closely with the company in the years since to refine successive versions of its design. In a pleasant twist, the world’s fastest man has helped democratize speed.
Leo Chang, a decorated Nike designer who has worked with Kipchoge on the brand’s running shoes, is perhaps best known for his work with Kobe Bryant on the late Laker’s signature sneaker line. “Kobe was this incredible visionary and was able to really dive very deep in product and push us to a new space beyond where his peers wanted to be,” he told me. “Kipchoge is like that, but different. He's like a guru. He'll drop quotes of wisdom that make you think, Oh my God, that was so poetic. But he also has ideas like, OK, I want you to sculpt away a little bit more in the forefoot.”
Kipchoge may be significantly faster than the pavement pounders who wear his shoes. But a few of his most elite qualities, Chang and his design colleague Tony Bignell told me, lend themselves well to wear-testing. “He's incredibly consistent. Every time you hit the ground for hundreds and hundreds of miles, it's the same,” Bignell said. “Then second of all, he's very articulate. I think when you've got both of those, that's a secret for success.”
And Kipchoge, Bignell and Chang told me, has a unique way of giving feedback: he’ll give the designers sketches of changes he’d like to make, or tweaks they might consider. “Drawing,” Kipchoge emphasized, “actually is being specific.” And, it turns out, most of Kipchoge’s suggestions make sense. “A lot of it is pretty actionable,” Chang said. “We try and employ most of it. None of it's really outlandish. It's all based on his intuitions and on trying things. For example, he may go out and do 100 mile-plus weeks in his training. When he talks about protection, he really is thinking about how to be fresher the next day, how to be fresher for his double that afternoon. While the average person does not do 100-plus miles a week, they are still feeling the same pain and fatigue from training.”
Kipchoge confirmed that, while he’s trying to make the best shoe he can, he’s also got the average runner in mind. “That's the beauty of the supershoe,” he said. “It's not meant for professionals who can run very fast. It's also for the social runners who can push themselves to beat their personal best.” Pre-supershoes, he went on, you might run a marathon and be so sore that it would affect your ability to do your day job. No longer. “That's the beauty of the shoes,” he said. “It helps us to push our limits, it helps takes care of our muscles, and know we can do our normal jobs—and at the same time run and get benefits.”
That’s sort of how Kipchoge, 40, thinks about the end of his career, too, looming in the distance. The whole point to running, as he sees it, is to inspire people. “Everything that has a beginning, has an end,” he said. “But even if you leave the sports arena when you are not performing the way you have been performing, inspiration is what we need. If you can still inspire a woman or a kid somewhere in Saudi Arabia or in Jamaica or in Haiti or in America or somewhere in Maldives, that's what you want. Or somebody can still follow you from India or from China, from Japan, from a small country somewhere? That's what we need. It's about, actually: are you inspiring?”
Being a three time Olympic champion would help in this mission, sure, but isn’t exactly necessary. “The time comes, I don't need to be competing personally to inspire people,” he went on. “Because I believe that what makes a mountain, actually, is not the top. What makes a mountain strong is the sides. So at the moment I'll not be competing, I'll be among the sides and trying to go around in the mountain, telling people, ‘Hey, let us run.’”
The Paris marathon will be a hard one, as all Olympic marathons are: It’s in the dead of summer, and nobody’s looking to set a world record—conditions that usually produce a slow, tactical race.
After that? Something new, eventually, whatever that looks like. An ending, but also a beginning. “I think it will come,” Kipchoge said. “But I'm ready for it.”