When he started running in the early 2000s, a young Eliud Kipchoge simply wanted to hop on a plane and head to Europe. Two decades later, the Kenyan marathon legend is heading to Paris for what could be his final challenge at the 2024 Olympics.

The Kenyan is currently tied with Ethiopian legend Abebe Bikila and Germany's Waldemar Cierpinski for the most Olympic marathon victories. One more in Paris and Kipchoge will be crowned the greatest of all time.

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. Now, at 39, the Kenyan hopes to make history on 11 August by becoming the first to win the Olympic Marathon three times in a row, beating Ethiopia's Abebe Bikila and Germany's Waldemar Cierpinski.

Kipchoge's brilliant career predicts that his dream can come true, and 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.

Also Kenya's president William Tuto is confident that the country will put on a good show and confirm its status as a global sporting superpower "You are our gallant warriors in this sporting challenge and rest assured that the entire country is behind you in every step of this noble task as you unleash your full potential at the global showpiece," the President said. 

A confident Kipchoge

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.

For the Kenyan, running has always been natural and almost innate: ‘Running is normal in our village, in our community, you run to and from school, to the mall,’ he explains.

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.

A life devoted to athletics

Kipchoge 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.

As a marathon runner, Kipchoge has known few failures, but he finished sixth in Boston in 2023 and was tenth in Tokyo in March this year, his worst result.