While purists insist Faith Kipyegon’s breaking four attempt or Eliud Kipchoge’s sub-two-hour marathon mean little, Ben Bloom argues that such showcases are the perfect way for athletics to build attention

I’ve had a vision – quite a specific one – for a few years now and I think I need to speak to Barry Hearn about it. For anyone unfamiliar, Hearn is the sports promoting maestro who guided snooker through its 1980s heyday (and beyond) and has recently turned darts into Britain’s biggest sporting party, generating an enormous £1 million prize fund for next year’s world champion. Hearn has made a career out of thinking outside of the box. Which brings me to my vision. It isn’t about athletics, but you’ll get the gist.

The setting: Tower Bridge, London.

The headline acts: Tom Daley, Jack Laugher, Andrea Spendolini-Sirieux and the rest of Britain’s current diving stars. The task: See how many somersaults and twists they can perform while flinging themselves off the iconic London landmark and into the River Thames.

Before anyone writes in to point out the numerous impracticalities of such an idea, I do not have the faintest clue about logistics. I’ll leave those matters to Hearn.

But imagine it. The images would be spectacular, blasted across social and traditional media, and catapulting diving into the public realm like never before.

What would it prove? Absolutely nothing. But it would showcase the superhuman abilities of sportsmen and women who struggle for airtime from one Olympic Games to the next. That, surely, has to be a positive thing.

Now, many devoted athletics followers are not fully onboard with Michael Johnson’s Grand Slam Track – the new series that ignores the field element of the sport entirely, not to mention a whole host of track events. But Johnson, unashamedly, does not care because those people are not his target audience. He wants to extend the reach of athletics (or certain track parts of it) beyond those who already love it, and take it to the masses.

It is a bold plan and the jury remains out on his ability to achieve it (this article was written before GST in LA was cancelled), but at its core is a simple, commendable, aspiration to get more people watching some semblance of the sport. Good on him.

It is for the same reason that I am such a big fan of Faith Kipyegon’s attempt to become the first woman to run a mile in less than four minutes. There will be many athletics purists out there who could not care less about the event, which will take place in Paris in late June, or perhaps even think it might denigrate the sport in some way. 

While we do not yet know the intricacies of the support she will be given to aid her cause, we do know it will render whatever time she runs unratifiable under World Athletics regulations. So be it. Tell that to the millions – if not billions – of people who will read about it or watch it if she achieves her enormously ambitious goal.

Speaking to Geoff Wightman recently, he recalled interviewing Eliud Kipchoge prior to this year’s London Marathon and asking the great Kenyan what one running memory he would keep if forced to whittle it down. The answer was not his Olympic titles, nor his various marathon triumphs or world records, but becoming the first human to run 26.2 miles in under two hours.

There was a sizeable athletics following who could not stomach the manner in which Kipchoge broke that mark, given the contrived nature of the event. Indeed, the revered former AW photographer Mark Shearman chose to attend the annual England Athletics Awards instead of travelling to Vienna. “Not a pacemaker in sight,” he quipped of the awards ceremony. “Well, maybe one or two with the more elderly of the attendees.”

Mark may well challenge my view of things, and I humbly defer to a man who has attended more athletics meetings than I ever will. But I will respectfully disagree with anyone who suggests that these manufactured events are not beneficial for athletics.

Like almost every sport (football the notable outlier), athletics needs exposure. In this era of sports entertainment, it is no longer sufficient to stick with the status quo and hope everything will endure in perpetuity.

Kipchoge’s sub two-hour marathon feat created headlines globally in a way that no traditional athletics competition – even the Olympics – ever could.

On a smaller scale, I was a keen supporter of the Mondo Duplantis vs Karsten Warholm 100m showdown in Zurich last year. A man clocking 10.37 to beat another in 10.47 is incomparable even to national-standard sprinting, but the narrative around it was compelling and, crucially, it was great publicity for the sport.

In a desperate quest for more eyeballs, the seemingly alternative option – which increasing numbers of sports are choosing – is to open the doors to social media influencers with huge online followings. No thank you. If the choice is watching a sporting great try something a bit different or a YouTuber not fit to lace their spikes, then I know which one I would advocate athletics choosing.

Kipchoge, Kipyegon, Duplantis and Warholm are wonderful freaks of nature. They deserve the world to know about them, and if it takes a superficial event to capture attention then that is fine by me.

What else could we try? How about putting a springy take-off board down and seeing what distance Miltiadis Tentoglou and his fellow long-jumpers can reach with the help of a trampoline? Or give Arshad Nadeem and the world’s best javelin throwers a specially designed super-spear, and see whether they can fling it from one side of the Great Pyramid of Giza to the other.

These ideas are semi-serious at best (although I remain adamant that the Tower Bridge diving one has legs!) and I know perfectly well there will be all manner of reasons why they cannot ever be realised, but the value of novel thinking in sport should never be underestimated.

Unlike some of his predecessors, World Athletics president Seb Coe has shown himself to be firmly on board with evolution. When asked in 2019 about Kipchoge’s sub two-hour marathon, he offered a pragmatic view. “I have encouraged organisations who want to promote our sport to be creative and sometimes think outside of the box,” he said. “If people are going to get excited and a few young people might decide that marathon running or road running is for them, or frankly just want to do something for their health and wellbeing through running, then I can be pretty catholic about it.”

Contrast that with Primo Nebiolo, who ran the governing body for almost the entirety of the 1980s and 1990s, and was wholly dismissive of the 1997 multi-million-dollar 150m showdown between Johnson and Donovan Bailey to decide the “world’s fastest man”. After a race that ultimately underwhelmed when Johnson pulled up injured, Nebiolo said: “This is not sports as entertainment, but more like something out of a circus. And we’re not interested in it.”

Such an attitude would not cut it in the present day. Why would anyone who loves sport not support any event that showcases the brilliance of the superstars who do it better than anyone else on the planet? There is little point in preserving sport’s sanctity if no one is around to watch it.

When Kipyegon sets off in Paris there is every chance she will not succeed – remember, Kipchoge only broke the marathon’s two-hour mark at his second attempt under manufactured conditions. Cutting nearly eight seconds off her already extraordinary world record will be incredibly difficult regardless of additional, illegal, help.

If she does manage it, expect the fanfare to be enormous. The mile transcends sport, and people who know nothing about athletics are familiar with the name Roger Bannister more than 70 years after he became the first man to run a sub four-minute mile.

“We’ll still be talking about Kipyegon in 150 years’ time if she does this,” says Wightman. It is difficult to see how anyone can consider that a bad thing.