Obnoxious WSJ article calling Breaking2 and Kipchoge a failure

1. It did fail.

2. Sara is about as well known a running journalist as anyone these days. She's been on the flotrack podcast multiple times, and her brother Philo was on Syracuse's national title team.

Everyone but the paid Nike shills here know it was a huge publicity stunt that has nothing to do with racing and the rules of real marathons. They're the only ones with their panties in a twist.

What did the stunt accomplish? Convince people that Kipchoge is amazing? We already knew that. Waste of a spring for the 'thon GOAT.

At least he got a nice pay day out of it.

Bring Back the 880 wrote:

What did the stunt accomplish? Convince people that Kipchoge is amazing? We already knew that. Waste of a spring for the 'thon GOAT.

At least he got a nice pay day out of it.

It proved that technically, its possible.

I literally didn't believe a man could run that fast for that long, even in perfect, petri-dish conditions.

Lenny Leonard wrote:

1. It did fail.

2. Sara is about as well known a running journalist as anyone these days. She's been on the flotrack podcast multiple times, and her brother Philo was on Syracuse's national title team.

Come on. Yes, they did not break 2hrs but this event was still a sucess. No one thought Kipchoge was going to come nearly as close as he did with that 2:00:25, even with all of the advantages Nike was providing.

My main issue with the article is that it will mostly be read by people that don't follow running and does a real disservice to Kipchoge.

For instance, she pointlessly states: "It is the third time Mr. Kipchoge has fallen short when chasing a time goal."

This makes it seem like he is some big flop to non-runners whereas people that truly follow the spot know how incredible he is.

The article shows no respect for the incredible athletic feat that took place. He was giving 200% out there and came tantalizingly close. No big blow or crumbling like everyone was calling.

You do realize news articles are purposely constructed/sensationalized to generate reactions such as yours, right? Attention equals money for the news. Most people are too dumb to grasp this simple concept.

Sara is a great journalist.

The #1 rule to remember about journalism, the author doesn't write the headlines. That's probably the thing that is most upsetting to you.

That being said, I wouldn't have called it in the article "a rare marketing miss" like she did.

I was a critic of the event and feel like it was a success from a marketing standpoint. Right now on the New York Times, they have a headline saying, "Eliud Kipchoge Runs World’s Fastest Marathon, in Nike’s Special Shoes".

How much is that worth?

I still don't get why people are being so emotional about it. If you say anything that is in the tiniest way critical, people like the OP go nuts. It was a marketing event for Nike. Last time I checked there were no adidas athletes in the event.

Last night, you'd think I assassinated someone when I sent out a tweet in mile 25 saying it was over and we'd been vindicated Kipchoge wouldn't be breaking 25. Here is what I wrote, "It's over. LetsRun is proven to be correct. Eliud Kipchoge willl not be breaking 2. He's fallen off pace."

People were all emoitonally invested in it and became IRATE that I was reporting a fact.

I can understand why people maybe think we shouldn't have been injecting ourselves into it but I was mainly just doing that as I'd risked my entire professional credibility from day 1 as a vocal critic who said this wouldn't happened.

“Dream barriers look very high until someone climbs them. They are not barriers anymore.”

— Lasse Viren

This completely misses the point, which is that Kipchoge proved the feasibility of breaking 2. Now, you may say as I did that the pace car's drafting added significantly or may have added significantly to the drafting from the pacers and so on, and maybe he did have cheater's shoes (didn't help the others), but this was still a remarkable feat. To go 2 1/2 minutes faster than the world record on a flat course without a tail wind and presumably without substantial springs in the shoes is actually an astonishing success and it will be remembered that way unless either the shoes or the drugs turn out to have aided this even more. I'd be interested in seeing calculations on the drafting from the windscreen but my admiration for Kipchoge just grew. After an hour, I was thinking that he could make it only 30 minutes more at most, since he was so close to his best half marathon pace (as if a woman were running, say, 66 for the first half), but he came extremely close in the end after actually holding pace through 35k or more.

Well, I'm not subscribing to read that article, but the only thing I'm able to see is that she only mentioned they have failed to break 2 hours.

That attempt only served two purposes: selling a bunch of shoes for 250 dollars a pair, (which are the exact same as the zoom streak 6 probably) and confirming to any clueless fool what the informed people who follow the sport already knew: That Kipchoge is currently the best marathon runner the world has ever seen.

I'm one of those that believed he would crash hard to run 2:03/4 so yes I'm very impressed.

Nobody will break 2 hours tough, everything was artificially aligned with illegal rabbits and pace cars and 25 seconds is a lot of time, it's doesn't even have to do with a number of attempts.

I still believe he should have raced in London and those 25 seconds he ran in excess would probably be the amount he would have run under the world record.

Virenlasse wrote:

“Dream barriers look very high until someone climbs them. They are not barriers anymore.”

— Lasse Viren

Said the blood doper ...

Bring Back the 880 wrote:

Waste of a spring

Bring Back the 880 wrote:

got a nice pay day out of it.

You're gonna need to pick one or the other of these sentiments, 880.

Bring Back the 880 wrote:

What did the stunt accomplish?

For me, what it accomplished is that I don't need to go chasing after those amazing super-hoaky carbonic shoes. The shoes made no difference.

Well your actually off, she is a mediocre journalist at best. Just because you like somebody does not mean they are good at something. Cleary she does little homework on the sport and has little feel for its essence.

Wether we are Nike fans or not this time trial by far is one the greatest positive PR publicity events the sport has witnessed in some time. The sport has been in the paper and media for a couple of weeks. The non athlete now has some perspective of a fast time in the marathon event, 2 hours.

We will see a significant change in running shoes going forward.

Professional credibility, what are you talking about, you stated an opinion, the only risk you would have had is if the 2 hour barrier was broken, you would apologize for being wrong, is you wouldn't do that your credibility would be shot.

What you should be saying is that this one one of most amazing marathon record attempts ever and how good it is for our sport. And maybe this time trial type of effort made for interesting TV viewing and maybe we could expand on this to give the sport more visibility.

So let me get this straight.

The goal was NOT to break 2 hours? It was just an attempt to prove that it was humanly possible?

Please show me a link where they said that prior to the race.

Weird Standards wrote:

So let me get this straight.

The goal was NOT to break 2 hours? It was just an attempt to prove that it was humanly possible?

Please show me a link where they said that prior to the race.

I remember that being said before the race

Rojo:

First, "the writer doesn't write the headlines" isn't really true, 100% of the time. I know this because I'm a journalist and I write my own headlines. At previous jobs, I didn't -- just saying, she may or may not have done her own headline.

Second, if you really don't understand why your "just reporting the fact" that "LetsRun will be proven correct" is immature and unprofessional, the mass of posters on here will never, ever be able to help you understand. You led with "I'm totally right!" and only then moved into the fact that Kipchoge wasn't going to get sub-2, as it if were the second-most important bit of info you had to deliver. Gloat first, fact second -- does this help? This is ignoring the fact that your saying "they totally won't break two!" wasn't some bold damn prediction -- I'd bet the majority of people watching didn't think they could do it. I was sure they would fail, and was rooting like hell that EK would prove me wrong. Your stupid tweet made it sound like you were rooting for them to fail just so the entity LetsRun could be proven correct.

For all that LetsRun does for our sport, it has a reputation for smugness and smarminess of this exact kind, and that doesn't help the reaction you get. If you guys had never posted something like that before (or, similarly, awkwardly side-angled a reference to Wejo pacing Paula or finishing fourth at USA's in a non-championship year into an unrelated or barely-related article), you'd probably be forgiven more easily.

Now, to the OP's post -- it's interesting, looking at various sources and seeing how they choose to emphasize what happened. I put "breaking2" into the Google News search. I'll exaggerate the headlines I found for effect here, but the first hit had a headline like "SO CLOSE! Kipchoge runs fastest-ever marathon, just over 2 hours!!!!!" and the second was more like "Lame-ass Nike idiots fail to break 2 hours in their stupid rigged race!!"

I guess if you already hated Nike, you might be unable to resist sneering at them. I have many reasons for disliking Nike, but I think what they put together here was a worthy endeavor, and I enjoyed watching it. Yes, I rolled my eyes at the marketing aspects of the broadcast (such as the clock disappearing when it became clear he wasn't going to break 2, or the announcers trying to suggest that EK, ZT, and LD had "prepared for this run for two years!"), but the endeavor itself was a worthy one, and EK made a very brave attempt. No matter that it didn't come under official record conditions, human achievement was advanced last night/early this morning.

If Nike's measure of success wasn't breaking 2 hours, maybe Nike shouldn't have called it the Breaking2 project.

The difference between the WSJ and nearly every other media report is............THE WSJ IS NOT DEPENDANT ON NIKE ADVERTISING DOLLARS OR NIKE INFLUENCERS.