Olympic marathon champion Eliud Kipchoge is on an impossible mission in Vienna, sports journalist Stanley Mativo has opined.
Kipchoge will on Saturday attempt to become the first man to run the 42-kilometre distance in under two hours in the Austria capital.
However, Mativo says 'Ineos 1:59 Challenge' will be a huge disappointment to the man who holds the current World Record at 2.01.39.
"The metrics alone are daunting: Breaking the two-hour threshold will mean maintaining an average pace of at least 13.1 miles per hour," he said on Thursday.
In an opinion piece on Citizen Digital, the journalist quoted an American journal which allegedly found out that the first man who will run a marathon in less than two hours will do in about 13 years to come.
"A statistical analysis research published in February this year in Medicine and Science in Sports and Exercise, an American College of Sports Medicine’s flagship journal found that a male marathon runner breaking the two-hour barrier is not likely to happen until 2032," Mativo quoted the journal.
"Kipchoge could break the sub-2 barrier on Saturday, but it is very very unlikely: there’s just a 2% chance of it ever happening, to be precise," he made a conclusion.
Mativo further quoted Professor Ross Tucker who told CNN Sport that what the 34-years-old Kenyan was doing was like defying the law of gravity.
“Getting a man to the moon involved overcoming gravity. What Kipchoge is doing is taking gravity out of the equation," said Tucker told CNN Sport.
“It would be the same as breaking the high jump record [set in 1993 by Cuba’s Javier Sotomayor at a height of 2.45m] on Mars where there is less gravity,” he added.
In his conclusion, Mativo said he was a patriotic Kenyan and had nothing against the athlete who has already been branded as the greatest marathoner of all time
"Yours truly wishes him well in the mission I have declared impossible," he said.