But of course Eliud Kipchoge can break the Boston Marathon world record…

I know a lot of people have been saying that Kenyan Eliud Kipchoge cannot beat the world record in the race in Massachusetts, USA. Can hit, can. Now, if it’s worth it, that’s another five hundred.

In 2011, two Kenyans were fighting head-to-head for leadership of the boston marathon in your final kilometers. It was them, Geoffrey Mutai It is Moses Mosop. Mutai, more experienced. ended up imposing himself in the end and won the race in two hours, three minutes and two seconds with Mosop arriving four seconds later.

We watched the test, me and the editor of the magazine Against the clock, at his home, in Vila Madalena, São Paulo, and we saw coach Marcos Paulo Reis, who was commenting on the marathon, remain mute with the result. Especially because around km 30 he had said that Boston was not a test to beat the world record. And actually, he wasn’t wrong. The race record so far was 2:05:52 for the Kenyan Robert Cheruyiot, three-time champion in Boston. The problem is that the 2:03:02 recorded by Mutai, lowered the race record by almost 3 minutes and by almost a minute the marathon world record, which at the time belonged to the Ethiopian Haile Gebresselassie – 2:03:59, in Berlin 2008.

Mutai actually hit but didn’t take it. What happens is that there are World Athletics rules for the approval of records in road races and Boston breaks two of them, so the Kenyan could not keep the title of record holder

One of the rules is that the start and finish of a race cannot have a distance greater than 50% between them. The Boston Marathon is the type of race we call point-to-point. It leaves from one city, Hopkinton, and arrives in another, in this case, Boston. This is used exactly to avoid situations like the one that occurred that year, in which there was a strong wind in favor of the athletes in the final part, which may have helped in the final result of the race.

The second is that the difference in altitude cannot be greater than one meter per kilometer. In the case of the marathon, there cannot be a difference greater than 42 meters. The race has the start 149 meters above sea level and the finish is 3. I think this one is self-explanatory, right? A rule to prevent organizers from running races on steep slopes to beat marks.

So how did it become considered Mutai’s brand, since he couldn’t be considered a world record? It remained as the race record, as the World Athletics rule only applies to records and was considered the best marathon brand in the world. So we, who have been working with running for years, always had to take into account two results when we talked about the men’s marathon – the world record and the best world mark. Who helped us end this story and the asterisk in the world records was the victory of the Kenyan Dennis Kimetto in Berlin, three years later, with 2:02:57, a mark that was only beaten in 2018, guess by who?

Then that’s it. Eliud Kipchoge can indeed break the world record at the Boston Marathon, which belongs to himself. It just won’t be approved. Simple. The only detail is that he said he will try to beat Mutai’s mark and that, I would really like to see it happen, after all, we are talking about a record that has lasted 12 years.

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