Why Faith Kipyegon won’t succeed in staged Breaking4 race
World record holder and three-time Olympic champion is the best ever, but the numbers, and the physiology, just don’t add up
By Amby Burfoot, Editor-At-Large, Marathon Handbook
I wish I knew something about online sports betting. I don’t. But someone could clear a nice chunk of cash on the upcoming Breaking4 project.
On June 26 in Paris, Nike-sponsored Faith Kipyegon will attempt to break 4:00 minutes in the Mile for an exhibition Mile race organized by Nike.
The company is hoping to build on the concept it launched in 2017 when Eliud Kipchoge ran the Breaking2 marathon in 2:00:25. Two years later, in a similar event sponsored by another company, Kipchoge ran 1:59:40.
The sub-4:00 Mile represents the biggest, most historic barrier in all of sports. When Roger Bannister ran 3:59.4 at Iffley Road Track in Oxford, England, on May 6, 1954, he became the most famous runner of all time. For all time.
However, Kipyegon won’t be following in Bannister’s footsteps. She has little to no chance to break 4:00. Bet against her.
As a sports-mad youngster, I spent hours listening to an LP record featuring the greatest moments in sports history. You know: “The Giants win the pennant! The Giants win the pennant! The Giants win the pennant!” Stuff like that.
My favorite moment by far was a sentence uttered by Norris McWhirter, who would later co-found The Guinness Book of World Records with his twin brother, Ross. Norris was the track announcer at Iffley Road on Bannister’s big day. After the race, he intoned:
“Ladies and gentlemen, here is the result of event nine, the one Mile: first, number forty-one, R. G. Bannister, Amateur Athletic Association and formerly of Exeter and Merton Colleges, Oxford, with a time which is a new meeting and track record, and which—subject to ratification—will be a new English Native, British National, All-Comers, European, British Empire, and World Record. The time was three…”
No one heard another word. Or needed to. This phrasing gave me goosebumps when I was 14, and it still does today.
The Electronic Era and 5-Digit Mile Times
There will be no such announcement on June 26 in Paris. We live in a digital age, and the LED scoreboard will flash Kipyegon’s time in a millisecond. It will have five digits—x:xx.xx—to Bannister’s four. The first digit will not be a 3.
In a moment, I’ll explain. But first, let me acknowledge that Kipyegon is the greatest female middle-distance runner of all time. She has won gold medals in the last three Olympic Games—2016, 2020, and last summer in Paris. No one else—male or female—has achieved that distinction.
She also holds the world record in the Mile at 4:07.64 and at 1500 meters in 3:49.04. The two are roughly equivalent. She’s consistently fast.
Kipyegon is a member of the famous Kalenjin tribe of elite runners in Kenya. She lives and trains at a no-frills, high-altitude camp in the Rift Valley—the same camp as Eliud Kipchoge. She also has the same coach as Kipchoge and appears to share his mental focus.
Kipchoge has said, “No human is limited.” Kipyegon says, “It’s all about the mind. If you keep on telling yourself that you can do it, you can do it.”
Kipyegon Has a Numbers Problem
Maybe. But Kipyegon, who is just 31 and therefore still at full power, has a numbers problem. You can’t break 4:00 minutes with your mind alone. Elite Milers must push the heart, lungs, blood and bones to extraordinary limits. Kipyegon simply doesn’t have the physiologic capacity required to run sub-4:00.
She just opened her 2025 racing season. At the Wanda Diamond League Meet in Xiamen, China, Kipyegon ran a sparkling 2:29.21 for 1000 meters, missing the world record by just 0.23 seconds. It seemed a good omen for Breaking4.
Except the math doesn’t work. According to World Athletics’ Scoring Tables, Kipyegon’s 1000-meter time is roughly equivalent to a Mile time of 4:12.70. Oopsie.
To run a 3:59.9 mile, Kipyegon should be able to run 800 meters in about 1:51–1:52. In real life, her best 800 is 1:57.68. She’s tied for 651st place on the all-time list. This is, to put it frankly, not a good starting point from which to attack a sub-4:00 Mile.
What Science Says About the Sub-4:00 Female Mile
Running scientists have been debating and exploring the female sub-4:00 Mile for some time. One wrote: “Human beings appear hardwired to attempt to break barriers, and we perceive the most significant barriers to be those in the round number format.”
Like, for example, the 2-hour marathon and the 4-minute Mile. Nice, round numbers. Easy to understand and to chase after. Runners enjoy the quest, fans enjoy the excitement, and top scientists can’t refrain from speculating.
Recently, several well-known running biomechanists attracted attention by switching to aerodynamics (drafting) and predicting a female could run 3:59.37 in a perfectly paced race (Royal Society Open Science).¹ They noted, however, that effective drafting in the Mile requires extraordinary precision.
“The athletes would need to devote significant practice time to coordinate the choreography of their movements,” they wrote. Indeed, there should be exactly 1.3 meters between the front pacer and the chosen runner, and another 1.3 meters to a rear pacer. We’ll return to this shortly.
An even newer paper (Journal of Applied Physiology)² predicted that a sub-4:00 female looms on the horizon. Depending on how and when you draw the progression lines, it “is projected to occur in 2030, 2038, or 2065.” Don’t hold your breath.
The authors of this paper include Andrew Jones, famous for his work with Paula Radcliffe and the Breaking2 marathon project. Also, surprisingly, a Nike physiologist named Brett Kirby. Maybe no one in Nike’s marketing department told Kirby about this year’s Breaking4 attempt?
Jones, Kirby and colleagues make several blunt points. Here’s one: “To our knowledge, there is no female athlete presently displaying the endurance characteristics required to run a sub-4 minute Mile.”
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