So you may have seen, heard or read about the recent (June 2025) attempt by Faith Kipyegon to run a mile on the track faster than any other woman in history. Supported and promoted by Nike and marketed as “Breaking 4” with the ‘moonshot’ goal of running sub-4 minutes. Now obviously, the ‘will-she, won’t she?’ can be good fun and gets the conversation going, but I wanted to explore how this can descend into lazy journalism and commentary and harmful headlines. For me, it’s indicative of how many view achievements by female athletes and sportswomen.
Phenomenal Athlete
Let’s start with some facts to paint a picture of this amazing athlete who came (as many of her team mates and friends have done) from humble beginnings in Kenya.
- 3 time 1500m Olympic Champion (2016, 2020, 2024) adding a silver in the 5000m at Paris.
- 4 golds and 2 silvers at the World Championships from 2013-2023 including the 2-second PB for silver at Doha only 15 months after giving birth!
- Current World Record holder in 1500m and the mile.
Quite good then!
Was it a risk?
There was quite a lot of talk in the build up to Breaking 4 along the lines of ‘why would she risk her reputation by attempting something like this? What a strange narrative! Did Roger Bannister ‘risk his reputation’ when he attempted to break the 4 minute barrier in 1954 at Iffley Road? Does Mondo Duplantis risk his, when putting the bar up to 1cm higher than his last WR every time he wins a pole-vault competition comfortably? And I certainly don’t remember any risks being mentioned when Kipchoge attempted to run faster than 21.1 km/h over the marathon distance.
Was sub-4 on?
Let’s be straight. Faith was almost certainly not going to run sub-4 on Thursday night. This was never about the one-shot moonshot, will she? won’t she? ‘sub-4 attempt’. Cynics will say it’s all about Nike marketing, but anyone involved on the sports science side of this project (mostly quietly working away in the background) will tell you that Nike’s involvement has been the catalyst for some much needed research into women’s physiology, specifically in middle distance running. Like it or not – most research & development in athletics through history is male centric. Whether it’s shoe design (see Allyson Felix’s story), physiology trials, nutrition, injury prevention or optimum training methods, it’s predominantly conducted for the benefit of male athletes. So, yes, whatever you think of Bill Gates or Bono’s motivation for being huge philanthropists and worth cause advocates, they still give and help raise millions, if not billions and raise awareness of just causes. So let’s not be too quick to criticise Nike… for this at least! Criticise them instead for cutting then 9x Olympic medalist (6 gold) Felix’s endorsement contract by 70% due to pregnancy – the happy outcome of which was her starting her own shoe company that actually used female feet to make the mould used to produce shoes for, you know, women… unlike almost all shoe manufacturers (athletics or otherwise).
So, for me, this was always about two things: Raising the profile and hence the amount of research into women’s sport and celebrating the achievement of a fantastic athlete and ambassador for athletics. You can watch a great podcast which explores the research angle more here.
Headlines
So did the news outlets agree? Well that depends where you look. It used to be that you could expect disparaging headlines from the gutter press but look to leading lights like the BBC and broadsheets for the real story. But the lines are blurred; unfortunately casual mysoginy is real, and present in these organisations. Before I look at some headlines, let’s once again use that dirty word: facts.
Faith Kipyegon ran a mile in 4m 06.42s. This was 1.22 seconds quicker than her own 2023 WR, which in itself was nearly 5 seconds quicker than the previous WR set by another phenomenal athlete Sifan Hassan in 2019. So she’s now run over 6 seconds quicker than any woman in history over the mile, albeit the latest time is not valid for an official WR, due to technical reasons such as male pacemakers and possibly technical shoe and apparel rules.
How did the BBC celebrate this triumph? She fell short apparently. An earlier version of the headline was “Kenyan fails to become first woman to run sub-4 minute mile”
The Guardian will be better, right? Nope… they went with ‘fails despite high tech kit and shoes’ as if she somehow contrived to miss an open goal tap-in.
And so it goes on…
Finally, I found one piece on page 2 of Google’s search results from Women’s Health magazine which explains what this really did for women’s athletics. Well done Polly (not that she needs my endorsement!)…
It’s hardly surprising though… the pre-race build up (on the live stream and most press at least) seemed to focus way too much on the technology of shoes and skinsuit with barely a mention of the huge dedication to training, hard work and sacrifice, nor the sports science, pushing the boundaries of physiology research and the opportunities that will be opened because of it. At least they championed the dare to dream message, and to be fair the Amazon Prime documentary was better. However, it still had at least 10 minutes of the Nike ‘Director of Apparel’ talking about the skinsuit and it’s largely ineffectual aero disruption nodes vs only 10 seconds of footage of Faith in a lab test surrounded by world leading physiologists including Dr Andy Jones saying ;’amazing data… 60 seconds to go Faith!’. You can hear a LOT more from Andy on this interview here.
And so we end up with journalism which is lazy at best, detrimental to women at worst. Remember that Bannister, Landy (and others) ‘failed’ several times from 1952-1954 in their quest for the magic 3:59. Six weeks later, Landy ran sub 3:58 and nowadays everyone can run sub-4*. OK, still relatively few but it numbers around 2000 in history with the current WR being 3:43. Kipchoge ‘failed’ in the first (Ineos 1:59) attempt before his success in Breaking 2. Since then the official WR has been lowered to 2:00:35 and it can’t be long before an official 1:59.
So let’s celebrate this for what it is. Have Faith!