How is Eliud Kipchoge only 37 years old ?

Not likely since Kipchoge won the World Championships in Paris in 2003 over 5,000 meters against El G. (2nd) and K. Bekele (3rd) when Kipchoge was reportedly 18 years old. It is hard to believe he was so good when young (18 at that time in 2003) AND now that he is old (37 in 2022).

According to Wikipedia, he was born on 5 November 1984.

Most fast runners distance runners with long careers look older due to time dilation.

It is also why some of them look shorter than they really are. The 5 foot 5 ones are really more like 6 feet standing still.

do you know how ridiculous it sounds to claim a guy is running 2:02 when he is 45…when the next fastest time for a 45 y.o. is 2:14…?

I’m confused. Has someone suggested he is 8 years older than claimed? I always assumed he was 2 to 4 years older. Getting close to 20 years at the top though. Who cares how old he is.

Is there some advantage to him lying about his age? We are tracing this back to a decision he made decades ago to be an age cheat so that he could win the junior world xc championship? At this point he should lie and claim to be older than he is. What a flex that would be, a guy over 40, or maybe 45, just dropped a 2:02!!

I agree that it sounds ridiculous, but I am just going by my source who is a Kenyan former elite runner who has more information than we do about the age of Kipchoge. I have little reason to disbelieve him. Kipchoge is an absolute outlier. However, I don’t think we will ever know his true age. By the way, age vagueness in Kenya is very common and as an example my source, the former Kenyan elite runner, told me that he’s 35 years old but when I checked his profile on world athletics it had his birthdate down as 1980 which would make him now 42 years old. This does not mean that my source is a dishonest person, but simply that in Kenya “mistruths” with regard to age are acceptable, ostensibly for pragmatic reasons.

This cultural phenomenon is way more interesting than the specific age of Kipchoge. Would be super interesting to get an explanation on why this is.

Unfortunately going over 10 IU HGH per day will cause that premature aging look.

You sound like an expert.

This means, that when Kipchoge ran that 5000 m in the world championships in Paris in 2003 he would’ve been 23 years old rather than 18 years old. Of course this is all conjecture and it might take a medical expert who evaluates bone density and other factors to give a more accurate estimate of Kipchoge‘s age.

For one thing, life expectancy in Kenya is around 65 years old, so anything which transforms a person’s age into a younger one would be advantageous from all points of view including athletics and getting agents to sign you up. Finding out what Kipchoge’s true age would be a difficult proposition, because even going by school records, one finds that in primary school/elementary school there are significant numbers of Kenyan students who are teenagers studying side-by-side with prepubescent children because they did not pass the required grade or started late. I have seen this situation with my own eyes when I visited local schools in 2009. This might be considered an aberration in modern first world societies, but not in Kenya.

40ish is my guess. He used to live next door to Bernard Barmassai in Elgon View. I was visiting with Bernard in 2005 and Kipchoge’s wife was outside and we were all talking. I asked how her how old Eliud was and she said 24 (I didn’t believe he was just 19-20 at the time).

How? Coz it’s only been 37 years since he was born.

That’s not a thing. There is no such technology to accurately estimate age today. Bone density is correlated with age, but a poor predictor unless you are looking for say predicting age to the nearest decade, that too only with like 80-90% accuracy, not perfect.

Maybe in future it will be possible to determine age using the level of carbon-14 in the crystallins in the lenses of the eyes, which reflects the atmospheric level of carbon-14 when the crystallins were formed. It can already be done with pretty accurate results but involves removal of the lens for analysis so isn't practical for living people.

Professional marathon runners are notorious for looking considerably older than their biological age. It's not just Kipchoge

God, I hate the way people pontificate about Kenya as if its some stone age pre-literate society with no records. It's so racist. What's worse, is the people who usually do this speak so authoritatively as if they know what they're talking about without ever having set foot. It's the only country where people purport to know more than the natives.

You know, Eliud's age because he's referenced it multiple times in interviews. Yet somehow, you believe this anonymous, mysterious former elite Kenyan runner because he told you what you wanted to hear.

^This! At some point, it starts getting absurd and ultimately begins to reflect on the purveyor's intellect.