Just moments before the Super Bowl started last Sunday, I clicked on Instagram, and the first picture on my feed shocked me and broke my heart. Marathon runner Kelvin Kiptum had died in a car accident in Kenya, when his car swerved off the road and crashed. It killed him and his coach. Anyone who follows along with distance running will know his name. Last Fall, he broke the world record for the marathon by running a two hour and thirty-five second marathon in Chicago. Thus, becoming the closest a person has ever come to breaking two hours in a race.
Similar to how people thought that no one would ever break the four-minute barrier in the mile, the chase to break two in the marathon garnered the same amount of skepticism. Kipchoge, the former marathon great, did break two hours in a marathon in the most controlled of outdoor environments, so it does not count as the official record, but it proved that it could happen, but no one has come as close as Kiptum in Chicago.
What makes his performance so impressive in Chicago is that he won by almost four minutes, so there was no one right behind him pushing him to the best time ever, it was just him motivating himself to achieve this unprecedented accomplishment. The way that I look at this, is like if Tom Brady won one Super Bowl and then died, or if Michel Jordan won his first championship for the Bulls and died. There would be enough of their careers to see that they had unrivaled potential, but then we never got the chance to see them reach their peak, and that is what makes this even more sad. He was 24, so undoubtedly, he was going to get faster, and he was signed up for a different marathon to have the chance to break two hours before racing in the Olympics.
Missing the Olympics also adds to the tragedy. This would be like if Lebron and Jordan were about to meet in the finals, when LeBron was a rookie, and LeBron dying right before they had the chance to face off. The Olympics was going to be the big faceoff between Kipchoge and Kiptum. It would be the passing of the torch from one great to the next, but now it will never happen.
What really bothers me is the fact that I have heard almost nothing about this happening. I listen to way too many podcasts about sports, and I listen to sports radio, and in the week since this has happened, I have heard no one mention it. My dad said that they mentioned it briefly on SportsCenter, but that is it. I know it happened the same day as the Super Bowl, but still this is someone who has done something literally no one else has ever done. Running is the most accessible sport, and it is the only sport where it is possible to end up in the same race as someone of this caliber. Technically I was in the same race as Kipchoge in Boston last year, but there is no chance that I would ever be in the same basketball game as Kevin Durant. So tens of thousands of people run these major marathons, so odds are they have some knowledge of Kelvin Kiptum, and if it was a young great athlete in literally any other sport, we would have heard so much about it.
So Kelvin Kiptum dying in general is a tragedy, but placing all of this on top of it adds even more to how sad this was. I never watched him race, when he was running Chicago, I was on a run with Jared on the canal, but I remember checking my phone after the run and being amazed at what Kiptum had done. When I saw the news last Sunday, it honestly made my eyes water, and I could not believe it, and when I told my dad, I had a hard time saying it, and it took a long time to snap out of the sadness that befell me from hearing the news. So if you read this, I hope you take a minute to stop and think about how impressive it is that this 24 year old ran a two hour and thirty five second marathon, which is an average pace of 4:36 per mile, and think about how sad it is that he is gone.
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