La entrevista aborda el polémico récord de Eliud Kipchoge al romper con la marca de las dos horas para un maratón.
But before the sweat had even dried, there were detractors. Purists pointed to the pace team, his squad of 41 interchanging runners, noting that, as at Monza, they rendered the performance ineligible for a world record. Others questioned Kipchoge's racing shoe: a prototype of Nike's Alphafly Next%. The pair he wore in Monza was itself a variation of the Vaporfly 4%, a shoe that promised 4 percent more efficiency than the next-fastest Nike model at the time. This new, unreleased version offered benefits unknown. Talk of the shoe being banned grew rampant. Afterward, World Athletics, the sport's governing body, decreed that, going forward, in international competitions athletes would have to compete in shoes that had been available to the public for at least four months, among other regulations.
Kipchoge's Nikes were legal, but that became the irony of sub-2:00: that the most modest of champions, a man who sleeps in a twin bed, drives an Isuzu pickup, and milks his own cows, became the focus of a debate about how relentless innovation complicates the ethics of the world's simplest sport. But amid all the talk about pacers and Alphaflys, it was easy to forget what it was that got Kipchoge into the ballpark of two hours in the first place: spending six days a week for nearly two decades in his camp's monastic seclusion.
Me quedo con el Eliud Kipchoge condensado en frases:
• “If you don't have faith in your training, then it's nothing,”
• “You cannot live alone in this world. The way to enjoy life is to meet people like you, to exchange ideas, to learn from each other.”
• “Don't miss the training in the morning and the evening, because the body is counting.”
• “What we're looking for here is consistency. Are you really training for all those four months? Are you eating well? Are you actually building in a positive way? That's what's required in sportsmen and -women in order to run very fast.”
• “I read the business books. You can translate business into running.”
• “I want everybody in this world to treat running as a lifestyle. I want to see people knowing that at five o'clock I need to run for 30 minutes. If I get there, then I will be a satisfied man.”
