ATHLETICS NEWS - This weekend, aided by a host of technological and environmental advances, three carefully-selected elite African athletes will attempt to run the first sub-two hour marathon.
The ‘Breaking2’ project is the latest enterprise of American sportswear giant Nike and has split opinion in the world of athletics, not to mention physiology.
In one camp are the ‘purists’, who claim that the host of benefits being bestowed on the runners, including revolutionary shoes, a pack of interchangeable pacemakers and a non-traditional course, mean the attempt is a marketing gimmick.
In some ways this is possibly the worst time to start shouting about fast marathon times with Kenya’s Rio Olympic and London marathon champion Jemima Sumgong’s recent positive doping test landing a body blow to the event.
Nike, and others, however, insist projects like ‘Breaking 2’ show that a combination of talent, training and technology can produce astounding results without the need for chemical assistance.
Many people are intrigued to see just how much difference such a collection of ‘marginal gains’ can make and suggest that, at a time when athletics is reeling from relentless bad news, such a quantum leap in human endurance, arguably the greatest in the sport’s history, is something to be welcomed and celebrated.
