It was not to be: the Parisian circuit had its difficulties and his body suffered: on Saturday in the marathon race he could be seen putting his hand on his hip and started to feel pains in his back. 

When Kipchoge was around the 30-kilometre mark, about eight minutes off the lead, he threw in the towel and stopped running. It was, he admitted afterwards, "his worst marathon".

His withdrawal was marked by respect: first, Kipchoge waited for all the runners to pass. Then he turned to the fans, handing them his shoes, bib and socks. The crowd's response matched that of the legend he has become, with applause and enthusiastic cheers continuing as he climbed into a waiting van. He will now have time to think over the next few months, although he still wants to run a few marathons.

In the end, Ethiopia's Tamirat Tola won the race in an Olympic record time of 2hr 06min 26secs, declaring it the "best day" of his life.

His legacy

Young Eliud loved to run, but he did not dream of glory. The youngest of four siblings, Kipchoge was raised by his single mother, a kindergarten teacher, in the village of Kapsisiywa in the foothills of Kenya's Rift Valley.

When he was a teenager, he often saw a neighbour during his training sessions, someone he had seen on television winning silver at the 1992 Olympic Games: the 3,000m steeplechase runner Patrick Sang. Thanks to this, he decided to take up athletics. Since then, the two men have hardly been apart and have developed an almost filial relationship.

Kipchoge, 39, dedicates his life to running and carefully records each of his training sessions in notebooks. Since 2002, he has lived nine months of the year at an elite camp run by the management agency Global Sports Communications in Kaptagat, a village in western Kenya at an altitude of 2,500 metres.

It was in Paris in 2003 when, aged just 18, he made a spectacular international debut, taking gold at the 5000m World Championships ahead of favourites Hicham El Gerrouj and Kenenisa Bekele.

Since the London 2012 marathon he has not stopped accumulating victories. With his long and metronomic pace, he has twice broken the marathon world record: 2:01:39 in 2018 and 2:01:09 in 2022. 

Thanks to these results, he has become the only man to cover the marathon distance of 42.195 kilometres (26.2 miles) in under two hours. He has also won 16 of the 20 official marathons he has run since 2013, including 11 major victories (five in Berlin, four in London, one in Tokyo and one in Chicago), as well as Olympic golds in 2016 and 2021.