Yomif Kejelcha, the athlete who made history and whom no one will remember

Neil Armstrong took a small step, and a little hop, to set foot on the Moon and plant a flag, and everyone talks about him, and he is the children’s hero, but, only a few seconds later, Buzz Aldrin also descended from Apollo XI to greet the selenites. He was talked about less, just as a certain silence surrounds the very slender figure (1.86m, 59 kilos) of Yomif Kejelcha, who accompanied Sabastian Sawe on Sunday until the last mile of the London Marathon and also, like the Kenyan who recorded 1:59.30 on his white shoes, reached the Moon of two hours, only 11 seconds later.

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“It’s my destiny,” Kejelcha might have declared, eternally second in almost all competitions, a kind of Poulidor of athletics, who adds to his four silver medals in all types of World Championships – cross country, outdoor track, and road – the unusual misfortune of breaking two hours in his debut marathon and not winning it. Only he can loudly say that he has never run a marathon over two hours.

Perhaps his mindset, a modesty, a lack of ambition, which doesn’t align with his spectacular class and style, has something to do with the stubbornness with which he accumulates good results and few victories (two indoor 3000m world titles are all) an athlete who has achieved great marks in all distances: in the mile (he was the indoor world record holder for the distance, 3m 47.01s), in the 3000m (7m 23.64s), in the 5000m (12m 38.95s), the 10000m (26m 31.01s) and the half marathon (57m 30s, the second best mark in history, as in the marathon, his fate). Haile Gebrselassie and Kenenisa Bekele, his elders and references in Ethiopian athletics, achieved Olympic and world titles, and records, but their marks pale next to those of the humble Kejelcha, defeated by an opportunistic Frenchman in the final straight of the last 10000m World Championship in Tokyo.

That same lack of importance is also evident in his statements before and after the 42.195 kilometers to London’s Big Ben and beyond. Before the race, Kejelcha, 28, said it would be “impossible” for him to break two hours in his first marathon, although he would try to follow the pace of the pacers who would guide his Adidas teammate Sawe up to kilometer 30. After his 1h 59m 41s, he was on cloud nine, despite not winning, as almost always. “It’s crazy, I feel great, I have no words,” he said after the race. “My coaches told me I was ready… I didn’t expect to break two hours, but London is also my dream marathon. I come to London and this happens in London, and I’m very happy…”

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The track pedigree that pleases fans differentiates Kejelcha from Sawe, a 31-year-old athlete belonging to the Kenyan stable of Italian manager Gianni Demadonna, a 71-year-old marathon runner, and trained by an Italian from Brescia, Claudio Berardelli (the same coach as 800m Olympic champion Emmanuel Wanyonyi), who has only run on asphalt. He has run four marathons and won all four (Valencia, Berlin, and twice London), and in the last one, he improved his best time by 2m 35s, achieved in his debut at the distance in the capital of Turia. Kejelcha’s story also includes a turbulent period, his years in Oregon trained by Alberto Salazar, a former marathon runner suspended for his doping practices, who managed Nike’s long-distance projects.

Shortly after, Kejelcha, Adidas’s plan B in London, left Nike, the first brand to announce the sub-two-hour project. It was achieved in a circus-like manner in 2019 with Eliud Kipchoge, but viewed from a distance, that accelerated stroll through Vienna’s Prater is like the Soviet Sputnik compared to NASA’s Apollo XI, which in athletics is equivalent to the 97-gram, single-use, $500 online shoes, a carbon plate enclosing air foam on which Sawe, Kejelcha, and also a woman, the Ethiopian Tigst Assefa, navigated, who also broke a world record (that of the women-only marathon, without male pacers) when she won on London’s Mall with 2h 15m 41s, defeating Kenyan Hellen Obiri, who wore laceless On shoes, fitted like a sock, custom-made with a 3D printer for her feet. The proliferation of records in a single morning alongside the Thames precisely reveals the weight of technological advancements in their achievement.

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