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Tomorrow in Paris, Kenyan track star Faith Kipyegon will attempt to become the first woman to run a mile in under four minutes.
It’s a daunting challenge. Though the mile has lost much of its lustre since its mid-20th-century heyday and is not part of the Olympics or the world championships, some still consider it the ultimate test of a runner. It demands a special blend of speed, strength, fitness, endurance, intelligence and, because it’s so painful, raw courage. And, to do it in four minutes, Kipyegon won’t have to merely break the women’s world record — she’ll have to obliterate it.
In the 71 years since English medical student Roger Bannister ran the first sub-four-minute mile on a cinder track at Oxford University, the men’s record has been lowered to 3:43.13 (by Morocco’s Hicham El Guerrouj in 1999). But the women’s record, set by Kipyegon herself in 2023 in Monaco, is 4:07.64.
A mile is 1,609 metres — a little over four full laps of the 400-metre track. So, for Kipyegon to go sub-4, she’ll have to trim her world-record pace by about two seconds per lap. That may not sound like much, but at a four-minute-mile pace two seconds equals about 13.4 metres. So, the 31-year-old mom will have to beat the ghost of her 2023 world-record self by about 54 metres.
If anyone can do it, though, it’s Kipyegon. She’s won three world titles and three consecutive Olympic gold medals in the 1,500m — the closest thing to a mile offered at the majors. She’s also the reigning world champion in the 5,000m and took silver in that distance at the Paris Olympics last year. When Kipyegon broke the women’s mile world record in 2023, she lopped almost five seconds off Sifan Hassan’s standard from four years earlier. Before that, it took more than three decades to lower the record by that much.
WATCH | Why Faith Kipyegon could be the 1st woman to run a sub-4-minute mile:
Chris Chavez explains why Faith Kipyegon could be the 1st woman to run sub-4 in the mile, and how it could impact her global legacy.
Kipyegon will also have plenty of help on Thursday. Her attempt to break the four-minute barrier is sponsored by Nike, which has branded the project Breaking4 — a riff on the Breaking2 campaign it devised for Kenya’s Eliud Kipchoge (and two other athletes) to become the first person to run a sub-two-hour marathon in 2017. That highly choreographed time trial on a Formula One race track in Italy was unsuccessful (by just 25 seconds), but Kipchoge ran a 1:59:40 in a similar unsanctioned challenge two years later in Austria.
The exact pacing strategy hasn’t been released, but Kipyegon is expected to be joined by a rotating cast of pacers (possibly a mix of women and men) who run both in front of and behind her in a formation designed to minimize wind resistance and optimize drafting. They’ll be guided by the cutting-edge Wavelight system, which uses LED lights on the inside rail of the track to show the desired pace.
Nike is equipping Kipyegon with a bespoke pair of track spikes that feature a full-length carbon-fibre plate (de rigueur these days) and weigh just three ounces per shoe (25 per cent lighter than the ones she normally uses). She’ll also be wearing a custom-made shoulder-to-knee speed suit along with arm and leg sleeves and even a special sports bra. The track was carefully chosen as well. Paris’ Stade Sébastien Charléty is where Kipyegon broke her own 1,500m world record last year.
Kipyegon’s run at the four-minute mile will be shown live Thursday at 1:15 p.m. ET on Nike’s YouTube channel and Amazon Prime Video, which also has a two-part documentary series on the Breaking4 project.