Guest Post: The Greatest Field in the History of the Marathon

Please note that the following does not represent the views of myself, the original blog owner. It was written by a guest blogger, who has wished to remain anonymous. I will name him or her Cappie for ease of naming convention. None of what follows reflect what I believe at all. In fact, I find that running is an inferior sport to things such as kabaddi, cycling, and biathlon. However, if you were to ask me about running, I would say that Kenenisa Bekele and Haile Gebrselassie are by far the most interesting (and two of the best) runners of our generation. Actually, after you watch the marathon on Sunday, you should also tune into Eurosport to watch Liège-Bastogne-Liège, one of the monuments of cycling (Along with Milan-San Remo, De Ronde, Paris-Roubaix, and Il Lombardia). It promises to be a great day with a lot of attacking and a number of selections close to the finish in Ans (not actually in Liège). Anyways, here's Cappie's very long, but well-written and non-misantrhopic post:

Ladies and gentlemen, find your cowbells, because this Sunday morning, the greatest field ever assembled in the history of the marathon will be racing 26.2 miles through the streets of London! Yes, Boston is hands-down the most revered road race in the world, but year after year, the folks at the Virgin Money London Marathon manage to recruit the more big-name international athletes to their race.

This is because the Boston course is famously difficult due to the Newton hills in the later miles, as well as the fact that the race is run without any pacers. Another reason is probably that London simply throws more money at its athletes. In addition to prize winnings, the top elite athletes get appearance fees, which are exactly what they sound like: money for showing up. These are usually undisclosed, but can easily be in the six figures for a top name. Considering that elite marathoners run no more than two or three races a year, this is actually not so exorbitant an amount of money. The appearance fees are also set-up with built-in incentives for actually finishing the race, not just standing on the start line.

Back to the race on Sunday: there are just not enough superlatives in the English language to express how incredible this field is. It’s so incredible that Eliud Kipchoge, the man with the most Olympic medals in the field and who is also at the peak of his marathon career, is considered somewhat of an underdog, overshadowed by the “Big Four.” Who are the Big Four, you ask? They are, in order of awesomeness, Dennis Kimetto, Wilson Kipsang, Geoffrey Mutai, and Emmanuel Mutai.

Think about it this way. Until September 2011, the world record for the marathon was 2 hours, 3 minutes and 59 seconds, held by none other than the peerless Haile Gebrselassie. He’s the one with two Olympic gold medals, eight World Championship gold medals, and world records at every eligible distance between 3000m and the marathon. Each one of the Big Four has run faster than this time. Dennis Kimetto is the current world record holder, with a ridiculous time of 2:02:57—yes, a full minute faster than Haile at his best. Kimetto has one of those heartwarming, “I was a farmer and didn’t run seriously until my mid-twenties” stories that can only come out of East Africa. The world record holder before Kimetto was Wilson Kipsang, whose record-breaking run in Berlin in 2013 was marred when a spectator near the finish line jumped in and broke the tape first, and wearing a t-shirt advertising an adult web site no less. The video is embedded below. Notice how completely nonsensical it must seem to an athlete who doesn’t speak perfect English when he is interviewed by someone who switches without warning between English and German. Kipsang handles it with aplomb.

The third of our Big Four, Geoffrey Mutai, ran an insanely fast 2:03:02 marathon in Boston on a very special day, with strong 20 mph tailwinds accompanying the runners all the way. This astonishing time smashed the existing course record by more than two minutes, and was nearly a full minute faster than the world record at the time. However, the Boston Marathon is actually not a world-record-eligible course. Its point-to-point nature and net elevation drop both disqualify it from record considerations. Emmanuel Mutai (no relation to Geoffrey) is the last of our Big Four, and is jokingly referred to in the Kenyan media as the “eternal bridesmaid” because he has finished second in more major marathons than anyone else in history. His most absurd second-place finish was at the 2014 Berlin Marathon, where he ran faster than the existing world record and still finished second to the aforementioned Dennis Kimetto. Emmanuel Mutai will have a great career as a motivational speaker awaiting him after he retires from marathon running.

Who will win? The chances are it will be one of these four, but there is a whole stable full of challengers who can mix things up a bit. Will the world record go down? Probably not, since London is not the best course for world record attempts (Berlin is). In 2013, with a similarly mind-boggling field, the race started at world record pace and fell apart after 22 miles, with victory ultimately going to Tsegaye Kebede, who kept his cool and finished in a relatively pedestrian time of 2:06:04. Kebede gives hilariously enthusiastic interviews, as seen in the embedded video below from after he won the Chicago Marathon. In 2014 London brought in the legend himself, Haile Gebrselassie (who we wrote about earlier), as a pacer, to make sure it was done right. Haile proceeded to slightly diminish his stature by taking the race out at an even more suicidal pace than the previous year. So, all this is to say, it ain’t easy to run a world record in London.

Even if the world record does not fall, the course record of 2:04:29 might. In almost every scenario I can think of, the pace will be fast—really fast. The winning time will be, with near certainty, faster than any American has ever run the 26.2 miles. The fastest ever American, Ryan Hall, ran his 2:04:58 time at the same once-in-a-lifetime, record ineligible Boston Marathon as Geoffrey Mutai’s career-best performance. Asics, the shoe company, did this hilarious stunt at the 2013 New York City Marathon, where they brought in a treadmill on a flat-bed trailer, hooked up some safety harnesses, and set the thing running at Ryan Hall’s marathon pace. It was quite the spectacle to see otherwise fit looking people try to move their legs as fast as they were physically able to, and yet still get spat out the back of the treadmill after a few seconds (embedded video below). The man widely regarded as the best current American marathoner, Meb Keflezighi, has won an Olympic silver medal in 2004 as well as both the Boston and New York marathons, and yet only has a personal best of 2:08:37, which he ran during his unlikely and heroic victory in Boston in the first race after the bombings. So, this means that, on a perfect day, Hall would be nearly a mile ahead of Keflezighi by the finish line, and yet Hall has, as of yet, not won a single major marathon. It just goes to show that the race is not always won by the fastest athlete in the field.

For those interested in waking up super-early to watch, the elite women start first at 9:20am local time (4:20am ET) while the elite men and the rest of the field will be off to the races at 10:10am local time (5:10am ET). Streaming is available from Universal Sports although it’s not clear whether you must have an existing subscription to use this service or not. For those of you who subscribe to a proxy service, you can, like me, watch the proceedings on BBC Sport.