Feat accompli: Rudraneil Sengupta writes on the rash of new records in sport

Since the Tokyo Olympics in 2021, records have been reset (in some cases more than once), by men and women, in sports ranging from the shot put, discus throw, 3000m steeplechase, 400m hurdles and pole vault, to the 2000m, 3000m, 5000m, 10,000m and mile runs, the half-marathon, full marathon and 50km and 100km ultra-marathons, and the 20km and 35km walks.

In one crazy week in February 2025, seven world records fell in the space of nine days, with Uganda’s Jacob Kiplimo dropping the half-marathon time by a whopping 48 seconds to 56:42, taking it below the 57-minute mark for the first time ever.

Then, three weeks ago, Kenya’s Sabastian Sawe did what was once considered impossible, completing a marathon in under two hours and setting a new world record of 1:59:30, in London. The statistics from that race are just one improbable number after another, the most striking detail being that Sawe’s speed increased with pretty much every lap. He completed the second half or split nearly 90 seconds faster than the first (60:29 to 59:01).

These are superhuman numbers, and yet they were also, in some sense, inevitable.

When the great Eliud Kipchoge sped his museum-worthy toes to a time below two hours in 2019, in a marathon set up for the express purposes of breaking the two-hour time barrier (and thus not officially recognised as a world record), he likened it to Neil Armstrong’s landing on the moon.

Yet when Sawe actually did it, his feat in London did not create quite the same frenzy. What was once a giant leap for mankind had lost some of its lustre. And why wouldn’t it? Ethiopia’s Yomif Kejelcha, who placed second, also broke the two-hour barrier (1:59:41), and Kiplimo, who came in third, broke the previous world record of 2:00:35 with a time of 2:00:28.

Whether it’s the progress of sports science, the “super-shoes” or some other aspect of performance-enhancing training and tech, we now live in a world where feats once thought impossible are now in the rear-view mirror. Who knows what new limits may be breached in coming years? Sawe, 31, Kejelcha, 28, and Kiplimo, 25, after all, are still at the start of their careers.

“Apres moi, le deluge (After me, the flood),” British runner Roger Bannister is supposed to have said, after becoming the first person to run a mile in under four minutes. Once a barrier is broken, he meant, we can expect a flood of others to follow. He wasn’t wrong.

The Swedish-American pole-vaulter Armand Duplantis has broken his own world record 15 times over the past six years. He’s done this rather methodically, by aiming (and often succeeding) to raise the record by about 1 cm at each competition.

Last year, when his record stood at 6.27m, I asked if 6.28 was really around the corner.

“It’s difficult to say,” he said. “I first broke the world record with 6.17 (in 2020) and I’m now at 6.27, and those 10 centimetres feel light years apart. It’s a completely different level of jump, so each time gets harder for me.”

Duplantis has reset the record five times since that conversation. It now stands at 6.31m. How much higher, faster and stronger can we go?

(Email rudraneil@gmail.com. The views expressed are personal)