The private jet with the name M-INTY turned heads when it landed at Kenya’s Eldoret International Airport on Monday evening.
The £20million aircraft is one of three owned by Sir Jim Ratcliffe, the billionaire Ineos industrialist bankrolling Eliud Kipchoge’s bid to become the first man to break two hours for a marathon.
Instead of London, initially mooted as host to the Ineos 1:59 Challenge at Battersea Park, Ratcliffe’s pilots steered a course from East Africa to Vienna, where Kipchoge is expected to get his challenge under way in the early hours of tomorrow morning.
Ratcliffe is renowned in business circles for rarely failing to come out on top and told Standard Sport from his Knightsbridge offices that he expects a similar outcome over the weekend.
“It is achieving the impossible to run a sub-two-hour marathon,” he said. “But if anyone can do it, Eliud can. The guy’s superhuman, he’s not really running at that pace, he’s virtually flying as his feet hardly hit the ground.”
The greatest marathon runner of all time, the 34-year-old attempted the time before and failed by an agonising 26 seconds. Since then, everything possible has been done to achieve the objective.
This has included keeping a close eye on the timings of Kipchoge’s flight aboard M-INTY, his sleep patterns, eating and every minute of his training schedule, which involved missing the World Championships in Doha.
A who’s who of distance runners will surround Kipchoge, including the Ingebrigtsen brothers, Henrik, Filip and Jakob, double world champion Bernard Lagat, Olympic champion Matthew Centrowitz and Paul Chelimo, who Mo Farah pipped to 5,000metre gold at the 2016 Olympics in Rio.
In all, a staggering 41 pacemakers will take part, meaning that along with Kipchoge there is a runner for every kilometre of the 42km course. Many have practised running in a wind tunnel to reduce the drag on the Kenyan, while the best formation has also been worked out to protect him from the elements.
Should Kipchoge, who needs to average 13.1mph, dip below the two-hour mark, it would be a jaw-dropping achievement.
There have, however, been question marks about the particular Nike shoe he will wear. Some believe the ZoomX Vaporfly will be banned like the synthetic swimsuits in 2010, although IAAF president Seb Coe appeared happy to let the technological race take its course when speaking in Doha last week.
However, the sports scientist Ross Tucker was disparaging in an interview with CNN. He said: “Getting man to the moon involved overcoming gravity. What Kipchoge is doing is taking gravity out of the equation. So the variables are too contrived for this to be regarded as a pure human accomplishment.”
Because of the set-up around the bid, the IAAF have made it clear the time will not count as a world record, which is held by Kipchoge anyway.
As for the question of whether he will do it, the man who has coached him since the age of 16, Patrick Sang, is even more convinced than the project’s bankroller. He said: “Eliud has an unwavering belief in himself and can complete the challenge.”
