Pop star attracts huge amount of publicity for his sub-three-hour marathon but isn't it all a bit over-the-top?

The media obsession with celebrity stories reached new heights this week when multiple newspapers, magazines and broadcasters such as the BBC excitedly reported on Harry Styles’ 2:59:13 in the Berlin Marathon.

The column inches devoted to the singer-songwriter’s result dwarfed the coverage given to the world championship marathons in Tokyo, whereas Sabastian Sawe, the Kenyan who ran almost an hour quicker than Styles to actually win in Berlin, must be wondering what he has to do to earn the same recognition.

Styles didn’t appear to be chasing any publicity either. He ran under a false name of Sted Sarandos – probably for practical and security reasons so he didn’t get mobbed – and wore sunglasses and a headband. Still, the reaction from the media has been considerable.

Various writers and ‘runfluencers’ on social media described his sub-three-hour run as something that has “mythical status” in marathon running and they gushed over his “amazingly even splits”. GQ magazine dissected his race day outfit and footwear. The Times dramatically described his long-sleeved t-shirt as “a death wish” in temperatures that hit 25C.

Now, don’t get me wrong, breaking three hours for a marathon is a fine achievement for a recreational runner. I have to admit that as a former 800m club runner (with a PB a little quicker than Keely but slower than Kratochvilova) I failed to break the barrier when I tried approaching my 40th birthday.

So I have respect for Styles’ achievement. It is not, however, some kind of wonder run that warranted an absurdly over-the-top level of coverage.

Here are a few stats to put it into perspective.

Styles placed 2245th in Berlin and there were 294 British runners ahead of him. The London Marathon ‘good for age’ qualification for someone in his age group (he is 31) is 2:55. If he wanted to merely make the results pages of AW a few years ago when we published a weekly magazine, he would have had to run half an hour quicker, whereas even our results pages cut-off standard for an M55 marathon was three hours dead.

I might have struggled to break three hours, but quite a few of my colleagues have managed it with ease. Paul Freary, who is slightly older than me at 57, clocked 2:51:10 this year (he considered that a bad run) while my former colleague Steve Smythe managed to break three hours consistently over a 40-year span from 2:54 in 1976 aged 18 to 2:56 in 2017 when he was 58.

I remember a heated debate on the I Was Or Am A Runner! page on Facebook a few years ago with a number of grizzled veterans arguing quite forcefully that a three-hour marathon was “not even running” but is best described as jogging.

Certainly if you consider the British Olympian Chris Maddocks once race-walked the New York City Marathon in 3:14, then they have a point.

Mike Sheridan of Newbury ran 2:59 at the age of 73, making him the oldest Briton to break the three-hour barrier. I could go on, but the aim of this column is not to belittle Styles’ achievement.

Instead it’s to highlight how ordinary athleticism increasingly receives incredible amounts of publicity if it comes with a novelty angle of some kind, in this case the runner in question being a well-known pop star.

I blame Eliud Kipchoge, as I think the trend started, or at least began to snowball, after he ran the 2015 Berlin Marathon. Back then he wasn’t very well known as it was four years before his sub-two-hour marathon in Vienna and one year before the first of his Olympic victories. But when he finished the race with the insole of his shoe flapping around, images of the incident went viral and he received far more coverage than he would have done if he had simply finished “normally”.

So spare a thought for Berlin winner Sawe or world champions in Tokyo, Peres Jepchirchir and Alphonce Simba, because Styles’ much slower performance has garnered the kind of coverage they can only dream of.