Gout Gout's true colours on show with six-word mantra after Usain Bolt statement

Gout Gout has taken the athletics world by storm since he rose to international acclaim in 2024, and a message on his phone's wallpaper is indicative of his sprinting aspirations
Australian sprint sensation Gout Gout keeps his Olympic ambitions close at hand with a distinct motivational message as his phone's wallpaper. Since he was 15, Gout has been smashing national records and turned heads this March with a scorching 19.98 in the 200m at the Queensland Athletics Championships.
The teenager then claimed the Australian 200m crown in April, although his sub-20-second runs weren't officially recorded due to an overly helpful tailwind. He does, however, hold the national record of 20.04.
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Gout also cracked the 10-second mark in the 100m the same month, which was another wind-assisted feat but a clear indication of his burgeoning prowess. The 17-year-old has since captured international attention, sparking conversations about possible Olympic success.
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With sights set on competing among the world's elite at the 2028 Olympics in Los Angeles, Gout is gunning for gold, especially as the Games will come to his home country in 2032.
Talking to GQ, Gout shared the six-word motivational mantra that he sees each day and adorns his phone screen: "You're going to be Olympic champion."
Coming off the back of Noah Lyles' gold-winning performance of 9.79 in the 2024 Olympics, the stakes are high for young Gout who, at just 20 years old by LA 2028, could be setting the track alight, reports the Mirror US.
Gout has not only set his sights on becoming an Olympic champion, but also dreams of dominating the track scene like the famed 100m and 200m world record holder, Usain Bolt
"I think the limit is just obviously winning Olympics and winning world championships and honestly dominating like Bolt did," Gout shared with FOX Sports Australia. "I think that limit is reachable for me.
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"The times I've run so far could potentially make it into [Olympic] finals, make the top four, top five, top six. Just getting better and aiming for LA obviously would be a great achievement," he added.
"[Just] trying to be on that podium running against [Letsile] Tebogo, Noah [Lyles], [Lachlan] Kennedy, all them athletes. That's definitely a goal of mine and to keep aiming for the top."
However, Gout's coach, Di Sheppard, has cautioned the young athlete that achieving his goals will require sacrifice and acceptance that his talents will eventually plateau.
"I've been telling him for a couple of years that when we get to a set point, your social life will be pretty much non-existent, in the sense you just can't go out where you want," she told The Guardian.
"He's at that point pretty much now, which is kind of tough when you think he's still at school. Things will plateau, that's a natural part. It has to come to a 'Bang, OK, now we've got to find our next adaptation phase to go up.'
"For us to go to the top – we're still a long way from there – and because we know that's our end goal, we don't get too wrapped up in the good things that come. They're stepping stones, and that's how I've tried to teach Gout. There's no clear path up."

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The Guardian

an hour ago

• The Guardian

Trump is terrified of Black culture. But not for the reasons you think

By the time Jesse Owens bowed his head from the highest podium tier to be crowned with his fourth Olympic wreath in the 1936 Berlin Olympics, Europe's premiers knew they had a problem. In front of a record-setting crowd at games that should have been a lavish display of Aryan propaganda, Owens's unmatched athleticism on the track humiliated the host Nazi regime and smashed one of the vital ideological pillars upon which European empires annexed the world into their racial order. Since the inception of race-based slavery and settler-colonialism in the 15th century, the novel idea that human beings could be stratified into distinct 'races,' with superiority defaulting to white Europeans, was bolstered by the claim that white racial supremacy was the rational outcome of the 'natural' biophysical, intellectual and aesthetic ascendancy of white people, and thus of whiteness itself. Adolf Hitler watched Owens, the five-time world record holder and grandson of enslaved people, triumph in his first event from a lavishly decorated imperial box, and abruptly exited the arena thereafter rather than witness Aryan athletes stumble to place second. In his conspicuous departure, a reluctant admission heard around the world had been made. A pillar was smashed. European physical superiority had been proven an undeniable fallacy and, more insultingly, Black dominance on the track was now a quantifiable fact. The ideological stakes of white supremacy – that whites were the smarter race, the sole ones capable of higher thought, that white people were the most physically beautiful, and also that the cultural products of whiteness were the most artistically valuable to advanced civilization – had suffered a powerful blow and shifted on its heels. In the 1930s, Hitler and his ministers embarked on a 'synchronization' campaign to bring fine arts, theatre, literature, architecture and media in line with Nazi propaganda – a move that was not unique to the Third Reich. All European colonizers expanded their empires via the theft and destruction of the cultures they subjugated, coupled with the intellectual propagandization of their own cultural superiority. Since the world wars, the march of modernity and the inescapability of western cultural imperialism continue to be hedged on that perfectly rigged game in which the products of whiteness are extolled as the most beautiful and significant because white intellectual arbiters tell us that they are. But in fewer than 40 years following the Berlin games, western empires were swiftly losing their hold on the cultures and minds under their rule. By the late 1960s, a Black freedom struggle in the US ignited a movement for African American identity, inspired by and linked to independence movements throughout the African continent and diaspora. The Black arts movement (BAM), a concerted effort to transform the artistic and cultural vanguard across Black politics, scholarship and organizations in the US, resulted in a creative explosion of cultural production centered on Black life and experience. BAM birthed a new Black consciousness – one sourced from self-determination and aimed squarely at thwarting claims of white cultural supremacy. It brought to the fore a generation of young Black writers, poets, artists, dancers and thespians who asked why any white-controlled institution was qualified to appraise art created for and by Black people. When Owens died in 1980 at just 66 years old, having spent his post-Olympiad life subjected to the repeated humiliations of Jim Crow, he and other 20th-century Black athletes had tapped the glass jaw in the myth white superiority and opened the floodgates for BAM's blitzkrieg against white cultural and intellectual hegemony. The movement was radically forged shifting away from conceding any white cultural supremacy, including a disinterest in white endorsement and patronage. BAM activists built their own institutions including bookstores, publishing houses, theatres, galleries, museums, cultural centers and scholarly journals and digests. Organizers started Black studies programs, conferences and curricula across the country. The movement understood that Black cultural production required Black intellectual production to secure its value and meaning. The ideological through-line from the overt white supremacy of the past to today is crystal clear. BAM's legacy can be found in the threat that Black culture and cultural institutions pose to new versions of old authoritarianism. In recent months, the Trump administration has advanced its culture wars to defund, demolish and demote the institutionalization of Black arts and culture, notably through very public takeovers of the Kennedy Center, Library of Congress, and Smithsonian Institution, along with several high-profile firings of Black experts and leadership in these and many other institutions reliant on federal funding. With book bans and the seizing of administrative, fiscal and curricular control of elite universities, Donald Trump has declared open war on all knowledge and expression that his administration deems anti-white. Much of the public discourse has summed up Trump's demolition efforts as an assault on diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) campaigns, and much of that discourse gets it wrong. In patronizing Black culture as merely worthy of representation in white spaces, we misconstrue the endgame of Trump's white supremacist politics. Trump knows that culture in the hands of subjugated peoples is a political weapon that he can't best. His lavish attempts at conjuring a culture via pageantry seem pathetic because they are. In a culture war fair fight, where Black people hold power in institutions, knowledge and politics, he will lose. Hitler wasn't affronted because Owens was included or represented in the games. The Führer stormed out infuriated after witnessing a Black man win. Even more important than its content, BAM's great victory was in putting forth an uncomfortable truth for the white mainstream: the cultural contributions of Black people laid bare the sheer fallacy of western cultural eminence. BAM was able to back up that claim with an organized Black scholarly and institutional thrust, thus exposing how claims of white cultural dominance were only buttressed by white political power. A look back at what BAM gained in turning Black cultural and scholarly institutions into wellsprings for Black political action explains why the Trump administration sees Black culture as an enemy. It also reveals what Americans got wrong by emphasizing the soft politics of representation and inclusion while shortchanging the capability of Black artistry to dethrone the great myth of white superiority. At the height of one of the most violent eras of the 20th century, BAM organizers set their sights on Black liberation, not conciliation. As a result, BAM's blueprint for Black power reoriented institutions and organizations and persists half a century later. Our stakes today are just as high, but in reducing Black culture into diversity and inclusion efforts we're playing directly into a game where Trump can expunge these politically inconsequential gains as soon as they are made. As the historian Gerald Horne has argued, African Americans have always been bilked of economic and political power in this country, but their cultural capital – particularly their visibility and influence – has long been outsized. For a demographic that consistently comprises only about 13% of the US population, Black entertainers, artists, musicians and athletes rank disproportionately among the most known and top performing figures in their fields. Black art forms such as the blues, jazz and hip-hop have done much of the heavy lifting of exporting 'Americanness' as a popular culture product around the world. By the late 1960s, in the wake of the assassination of Malcolm X, an emerging generation of young Black artists, poets, writers, dancers and thespians began asking what they should be getting for that cultural influence, if that capital could be transformed into political action, and if the power of their cultural production could be harnessed exclusively on their terms. The Black arts movement was an artists' call to arms, born directly out of the ideological shift towards Black nationalism that was triumphed by Malcolm X. He insisted that Black people were a nation within a nation, and that Blackness was a cultural nationality unto itself. Its identity and aesthetic was oriented in the African diaspora, not in assimilation into white America. After Malcolm X's death, Larry Neal, a key theorist of the movement, wrote, 'the struggle for black self-determination had entered a more serious, more profound stage' that necessitated the formation of a Black cultural thrust, the building of autonomous Black institutions, and the need for a Black theory of social change. BAM activists saw themselves as the cultural branch of the larger Black power movement, where art would enable Black people to imagine themselves beyond the dictates of white racism, and graft the ideals that could envision a world in which Black people have collective control of their political and economic lives. In line with Malcolm's 1962 missive at a Los Angeles church, in which he asked Black people, 'who taught you to hate yourself from the top of your head to the soles of your feet? Who taught you to hate the race that you belong to?', BAM forged a radical new expression of the Black aesthetic, one that both ignited sociocultural revolution and deposed the white gaze by recasting beauty itself as Blackness. 'Black is beautiful,' a refrain for the Black power generation, became more than a slogan that defined the time. It was a declaration of cultural independence and a battle cry in the fight for a sea change in Black identity. BAM converted Black cultural capital into Black political capital. Its key figures, who made up an extensive list of artists, activists and organizers – Amiri Baraka, Gwendolyn Brooks, Haki Madhubuti, Nikki Giovanni, Sonia Sanchez, Larry Neal, James Baldwin, Lorraine Hansberry, Audre Lorde, Maya Angelou, Gil Scott-Heron, Hoyt Fuller, Nathan Hare and Dudley Randall – understood that the politics of art was co-constituted with the art of politics. The movement swiftly enveloped better-known mainstream Black artists, including many who quietly funded causes such as the Black Panther party legal defense fund and several fledgling Black arts institutions. Artists such as John Coltrane, Stevie Wonder, Aretha Franklin, Nina Simone, Ruby Dee, Ossie Davis, Max Roach, Abbey Lincoln, Thelonious Monk and Harry Belafonte used their sounds, images and performances to amplify Black consciousness and liberation into the 1970s and beyond. BAM's artists radicalized a Black aesthetic into a political ideology and understood, as literary theorist Terry Eagleton explains, 'the aesthetic, one might argue, is […] the very paradigm of the ideological. Ideology and style are the same thing.' BAM was not a civil rights campaign, however, and its endgame was neither style and visibility nor representation and inclusion. What BAM artist-activists understood and made into a political strategy was the idea that art itself, as a product and form of Black expression, was not solely capable of liberating Black people. It needed to be safe-housed and incubated within Black communities by independent Black institutions. Thus even as BAM composed the cultural wing of Black power, it further deployed into subsidiaries across an institutional and scholarly landscape. BAM's organizational grid included numerous independent Black theatre companies, Black bookstores, independent Black K-12 schools, scholarly journals such as the Black Scholar, publishers including Third World Press, and digests such as Black World that became premier venues for the intellectual discourses that anchored Black art's political gravity and meanings. The art and cultural production of the movement offered a vision for revolution, but it was BAM's massive footprint across Black arts institutions and scholarship that converted that artistic vision to a currency of real social change for everyday Black communities, often accomplished by challenging the divide between 'fine' arts institutions and those serving the Black masses. Louis Chude-Sokei, the longtime editor of the Black Scholar, said how journal founders resisted the familiar elitism of academic scholarship. 'Their mission was to 'unite the academy and the street,' ... not just in terms of genre, language and style, but also in terms of the kind of people it affirmed as 'scholars' and 'intellectuals.'' In a survey by the Kerner Commission – Lyndon Johnson's national advisory board charged with investigating the underlying causes for Black urban social unrest and rebellion in the late 1960s – nearly 80% of Black respondents agreed with the statement 'all negroes should study African history and language.' Decades of toil, political gains and intensive planning and research by Black curators, historians and museum professionals resulted in the institutionalization of that survey into the world's largest museum complex. The Smithsonian's 19th installation, the massively popular National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC), opened just more than a month before Trump's 2016 election. It enshrines Black material culture as history by jettisoning an often repeated myth about America, in which the nation's supposed exceptionalism is a result of harmonious multiculturalism, where various ethnic groups have voluntarily contributed to an 'American tapestry.' Instead, the 'Black Smithsonian,' as it has been nicknamed by loyal supporters, forges upon a road BAM paved and challenges one to question the US's whitewashed history. The result is a meticulously accurate inverting of the American narrative into one told through African descended experience, in which the US's economic, political and social systems were established for and by the purpose of using stolen land to exploit the labor of stolen people. This is not a Disneyfied tale of 'diversity' that gestures towards Black offerings into the melting pot mythos of a 'nation of immigrants'. NMAAHC's masterful curatorial team, under the helm of the Smithsonian secretary Lonnie G Bunch, stayed true to much of BAM's core legacy by exhibiting Black culture with a mind for raising Black consciousness. Visitors leave the museum not only with amazement and reverence for Black cultural preservation, resistance and perseverance, but also with reliable and verified information, which, studies have shown, the public trusts more when coming from museums than any other source. Bucking the propagandistic synchronicity campaign of the Trump realm, however, has brought NMAAHC directly into the administration's crosshairs. In recent months the NMAAHC has been a battle ground for Trump's authoritarian government, in which an executive order entitled 'Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History,' accuses the museum of advancing an 'improper' and 'divisive, race-centered' ideology by 'promoting', among many expert-backed facts, 'the view that race is not a biological reality' – the very biological pseudoscience that was once a pillar of Aryan propaganda and bolstered European imperialism's tenet of white biophysical superiority. The executive order was not an empty threat and targets other federally backed institutions such as the Smithsonian's National Portrait Gallery (NPG), which recently appointed a Black woman as the director of curatorial affairs and featured an exhibition on the Black Figure, and the National Park System's Independence national historical park, which the order accused of 'interrogating institutional racism' in its trainings. Just a week ago, Kim Sajet, NPG's director, stepped down after Trump's recent call for her termination. Trump's synchronization campaign has further rolled into takeover efforts for federally backed institutions not named in the order, such as the John F Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. Trump swiftly removed the center's longtime director, Deborah Rutter, and replaced board members with his loyalists, who soon after elected him chair. At the Kennedy Center's opening night on 11 June, Trump was met by jeers and expletives from longtime patrons, with shouts of 'rapist!' and 'felon!' while admirers shouted up 'we love you!' to his box seats. Terminations of the personnel of these institutions are just one part of Trump's far more entrenched war to defund and eradicate the institutional infrastructure of arts and culture, including recent drastic cuts to the National Endowment for the Arts, National Endowment for the Humanities, the Institute of Museum and Library Services, and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, among many other public-private foundations. Marc Bamuthi Joseph, the Kennedy Center's recently fired vice-president and social impact director, as well as a poet, dancer and playwright, publicly indicted Trump's efforts to 'take down everything Black'. Trump's messaging has consistently referred to this propaganda campaign for state control of culture as an 'anti-DEI effort' – euphemistic phrasing that has been adopted uncritically by many media outlets and the political left. Adopting the terminology is an acceptance of the propaganda itself, in which Americans miss the true political thrust of culture to incite social change. We omit the lessons we should all be carrying from the Black arts movement that taught us both our real target and how to use culture as our weapon against it. The soft-bellied politics of 'diversity,' 'inclusion' and 'representation' are not a challenge to the remaining pillars of white supremacy, but rather a concession to it. For example, there are many who argue that the US's elite 'fine' arts institutions have championed the cause to diversify and address their histories of exclusion with an explosion of post-2020 Black hires into their leadership. 'These hires are largely ornamental,' said Chaédria LaBouvier, the Guggenheim Museum's first Black curator and first Black author of its catalogue, 'as evidenced by the many layoffs, firings and eliminations of these positions since they were instituted.' BAM activists were insistent that Black cultural expression came with a political ideology and warned against attempts by powerful white patrons to defang Black art of its meanings for Black people. Even in BAM's day, 'diversity' efforts were deployed as tools to dismantle Black radical politics. The Kerner Commission, angst-ridden about the possibilities of continued Black protest, suggested that Black people be assimilated into capitalism as a means to quell the Black freedom struggle. Nixon took up the task with diversity programs for Black business owners who he hoped would subdue Black resistance organizing in American cities. BAM insisted that Black art must be canonized by Black intellectuals. While the fine arts world has witnessed recent record-setting auction prices for pieces by Black artists, LaBouvier notes that these works are generally treated as commodities, with appraisals subjected to the caprice of market fluctuation, whereas the value of works by many white artists are stabilized by the canonizing research of overwhelmingly white art historians. Diversity, inclusion and representation reinforce a belief that the cultural contributions of oppressed peoples hold value only in the grasp and domain of their oppressors. As Rafael Walker, an assistant professor at Baruch College who specialized in American and African American literature, noted, 'when you're talking about representation, presentation is in the word. You're talking about presenting to someone, to another. Present to whom? The Black arts movement did not give a damn about presenting Black culture for anyone else's approval.' In his efforts to demolish and disappear Black culture and the institutions that support it, Trump has made a loud admission: if he truly believed that Black culture were inferior, he would be leaving it on display and intact. Its mere existence would prove white supremacy. Trump knows the real threat of Black culture that has been shortchanged in the public DEI discourse, as his administration is a metaphor in itself for mythology of white supremacy: extensively kleptocratic, grossly inept and held in power by depraved and ruthless violence. As Haki Madhubuti, a BAM founding father, explains of the movement's endgame: 'The mission is how do we become a whole people, and how do we begin to essentially tell our narrative, while at the same time move toward a level of success in this country and in the world? And we can do that. I know we can do that.' Trump's great fear is knowing we can, too. Spot illustrations by Tina Tona

BBC News

2 hours ago

• BBC News

How Athletes fit change dia kontri of allegiance?

Ova di years, di tori don be say athletes or sports pipo go travel go abroad to go compete under oda kontris flag. Dis mata dey normally loud as e concern di Olympics, wey be di competition wey dey happun evri year. No year, dis mata take clear as wen France win di 2018 Male World Cup wit about half of dia players wey get African ancestry. Plenti reason dey wey go make some pipo decide say dem go compete for anoda kontri apart from dia kontri of origin and dem include athletes wey get dual citizenship and fit choose, athletes wey marry get different citizenship outside dia kontri of orgin and athletes wey don complain taya wit how di mata be for dia kontri sport federation. Plenti Nigerians don dey di list of pipo wey bin compete in Nigeria bifor dem change dia kontri of allegiance. For 1992, Christy Opara Thompson bin gbab bronze medal for di 1992 Olympics for Nigeria only for am to port go di US six years later sake of say she marry for dia. In more recent times, Annette Echikunwoke port from Nigeria to go participate for di 2024 Paris Olympics under di flag of di United States of America and win silver medal for di women hammer throw. Dis one come afta she loss out for di Tokyo 2020 Olympics sake of say di federation no do out-of-competition drug testing requirements bifor di games. As she get dual citizenship since dem born her for Ohio, US na so she port o. For 2014, Ebelechukwu Agbapuonwu switch commitment to Bahrain one year afta she compete for di 2013 School Sports for Port Harcourt, Rivers State and also for National Youth Games for Illorin. Afta di move she change her name to Salwa Eid Naser and she gbab di silver medal for di women 400 metres for di 2024 Olympics. She sef get dual citizenship as her papa come from Bahrain. How pesin fit take change kontri of allegiance Di Global Sports Advocates download wetin dey needed by Olympics if to say pesin wan port from one kontri go anoda and in which scenarios. Remember say for Olympics, for you to represent specific kontri mean say you don be citizen or national of di kontri you wan represent. According to di Olympics Charter Rule 41 on participation pesin wey get citizenship for different kontris go fit choose under which flag e go contest inside but once e don participate for either Olympic games or even if na just, continental or regional games wey dey recognized by International Sports Federations (IF), e no fit just switch go anoda kontri like dat. Di rule be say, "competitor wey don represent one kontri bifor wey don change nationality or get new nationality fit participate for di Olympic Games if three years don pass since im last represent im last kontri." Caveat sha dey say di period fit dey reduced or cancelled sef if di IF and National Olympic Committees wey di competitor join hand agree but di mata still dey up to di International Olympic Committee Executive Board sha to take wetin cause di change into account. World Athletics get dia own laws as e concern change of affiliation wey still get the three years mandate but change small in di way e dey apply am according to citizenship claims. Dem say "di rules accept athletes affiliation abroad as long as dia original national federations approve am". But dem add say, "for athletes wey don already represent one kontri for World Championships, Olympic Games, continental, regional or area championships and cups, more requirements dey for dem to fulfil". Dem go on to tok am as say, "if athlete change citizenship through marriage, di transfer to di new kontri go dey wit immediate effect as long as di new kontri federation gree. "Howeva, if di new citizenship no click wit di marriage, wia di athlete still dey chase am, dem no go fit compete for di new kontri for three years afta di date of di last time wey dem represent di old kontri". But di World Athletics join bodi give small loophole for athletes to reduce di time dem go fit to compete. Dem tok say, "if di old and new federations join di WA to gree on top your mata, di three years fit reeduce to one". All in all, dis fit be di best time for anyone wey wan participate for di USA 2028 Olympics to make dia japa moves.

NBC News

2 hours ago

• NBC News

It's a barrier women have never broken. Can Faith Kipyegon make mile history?

Last winter, a study startled the running world when a team of researchers concluded that, under the right circumstances, Kenyan superstar Faith Kipyegon could break a barrier long thought impossible — becoming the first woman to run one mile in less than 4 minutes. In the coming days, under a worldwide spotlight, that theory will be put to the test. Kipyegon on Thursday will line up in Paris in a Nike-sponsored race called "Breaking4," just four laps — and 1,609 meters, to be exact — from history. If there were ever a runner to make such an attempt, it would be the 31-year-old Kipyegon. A three-time Olympic gold medalist in the 1,500 meters, who holds the world record in the 1,500 meters and formerly held the record at 5,000 meters, as well, she has come closer to the 4-minute barrier than anyone. In 2023, racing in Monaco, Kipyegon smashed the previous world record for the mile by running 4:07.64. 'She's really stretching your imagination and acceptance of how women can excel in sport,' said Rodger Kram, an associate professor emeritus at the University of Colorado who co-authored the study published in February in the Royal Society of Open Science. Yet speed alone won't make up the 7.64-second difference between her personal best and a barrier-breaking achievement — a lifetime in a race as short as the mile. The great variable surrounds how exactly Kipyegon will "draft" off pace-setters around her, thus reducing her aerodynamic drag. How many pacers Nike will use, and what formation they will employ, remains a mystery. Kipyegon told The Associated Press that 'breaking four will really cement my legacy.' Yet breaking four minutes could lead to a wider effect. Half-marathons and marathons have enjoyed a post-pandemic participation boom, but Kram wondered whether Kipyegon's example could inspire more women to run middle distances. 'To see that, one, we actually want to go after a female record, that's exciting,' said Shalaya Kipp, a former Olympic distance runner and NCAA champion who co-authored the study. 'It's going to not only draw more females to the sport, but it's also going to help draw more attention to female physiology and get more research done on females too. '... That's not the runner in me, but that's the scientist in me that gets really excited if we have this. Scientists are going to start working with more female athletes, and that is a big gap we have right now.' As experts in physiology and kinesiology, Kram, Kipp and their study's co-authors, Edson Soares da Silva and Wouter Hoogkamer, were already fans of running. But their pursuit of whether a female sub-4 mile was possible began in earnest in 2023 while watching Kipyegon run her 4:07 world record while using pacers for only half the race. 'It really stood out to us that this was a very fast race — a world record, of course — but she had terrible drafting,' said Kipp, a postdoctoral research fellow at the Mayo Clinic. 'We're track nerds, and we watched that, and we're like, 'Well, what if? What if?' And then we were like, we actually could do that math.' The researchers' sub-four findings were modeled on a scenario in which Kipyegon would draft off a team of all-female pacers, in part for the gender-breaking symbolism it would represent, Kipp said. In that scenario, the study found that if Kipyegon could stay within about 40 inches behind a pacer in front of her, and 40 inches in front of another behind her — with a new pacing team swapping in halfway through — it would create an aerodynamic 'pocket' in which she would face the least wind resistance. Under those conditions, Kipyegon could run 3:59.37, the paper concluded — the exact time run by Roger Bannister in 1954 when he, using pacers for more than 80% of the race, became the first person to ever break the sub-4 barrier. Less remembered is that also in 1954, Diane Leather became the first woman to break the 5-minute barrier in the mile. It took more than half a century for the idea of a woman running a sub-4 mile to enter the realm of possibility, however, as training, times and technology all improved. An inflection point arrived in 2016. That year, Nike became the first shoe company to combine an exceptionally bouncy new foam with rigid 'plates' in their shoes and spikes. Studies have determined such 'supershoes' require less effort to run at a given pace by absorbing the impact from each footstrike, allowing runners to rebound quicker. The breakthrough led Nike to design a different moonshot race, dubbed 'Breaking2,' in which Kenyan superstar Eliud Kipchoge attempted to become the first person to run a marathon in less than two hours. He came up 25 seconds short during his first try, in 2017. In his second attempt, three years later, Kipchoge ran 1:59.40. The times do not count as an official world record because the carefully tailored attempt did not meet the standards of the sport's global governing body, but it represented a seismic shift in what was possible all the same. It was also a sign of things to come. 'We opened the 2016 floodgates,' Kipp said, 'and we saw these times dropping.' Of the 50 fastest miles run by women all-time, 33 have been run since 2016, including 10 of the top 11. The world record of 4:12.56 had stood since 1996 until Sifan Hassan ran 0.23 of a second faster in 2019. Four years later, Kipyegon shattered Hassan's world record by a stunning 4.69 seconds in Monaco. In Paris this week, Kipyegon will wear custom-made Nike supershoe spikes as well as a speedsuit and custom bra designed to reduce drag. Kipyegon is unique in that her stride appears effortless, as if floating, Kipp said. Yet what matters most, Kram and Kipp said, is whether Kipyegon has improved at staying tucked in behind her pacers. Nike did not consult with Kram, Kipp or their research team on the technical details of Kipyegon's attempt. How the sportswear giant will handle the number and gender of the pacers has led to significant intrigue. Stadiums hosting professional meets feature a metal 'rail' on the inside of the first lane, separating the track from the infield. Because Paris's Stade Charlety has little rubberized track surface inside of the rail, it's unlikely it will have the space needed to use the type of 'full arrowhead' formation it employed in its attempt to help Kipchoge break two hours in the marathon. Kram wonders if Nike will employ a 'half arrowhead' or perhaps even the model the researchers studied, with one in front and one behind. He and Kipp will also be watching for how Kipyegon and her pacers line up at the start; how relaxed she appears while pushing an unprecedented pace; and, nearing the finish, when the pacers will peel away to allow Kipyegon to finish alone. 'I'm going to be watching to make sure that she's in the pocket, and that the pacers don't get too excited,' Kram said. '... In the first 200 (meters) you can ruin your chances for the mile. If she goes out and runs 27 (seconds), she's cooked. She's got to go out in 29, 29-high. 'If she comes through 1,200 in 3 minutes, I think she's going to get it. Other people are saying, 'Oh, that's when she's going to die.' But I believe in our numbers and our calculations.' Kipchoge and his training partners wore T-shirts featuring 'Breaking4' and Kipyegon's image during training recently. 'It's been an honor for us to support (Kipyegon) as she prepares to achieve the unthinkable and to break down the barriers of human performance,' Kipchoge wrote on Instagram. 'Faith is a true inspiration for our world. If there's one person to do it, it is you. Go for it!' The race also comes at a significant moment for Nike itself. The company's roots are in running — it was founded by a middle-distance runner, Phil Knight, and his collegiate track coach — and more runners finished distance races in 2024 wearing the brand than any other, according to an industry group survey. In recent years, however, Nike's shelf space and market share among running shoes has been challenged by newcomers such as Hoka and On. Kipyegon's sub-4 attempt will come on the same day that Nike is scheduled to host a quarterly earnings call. In the days before Kipyegon's race, Kram acknowledged having nerves over how the study's findings would fare in a real-life test. Many of his previous studies had received scant attention from the wider public, he said. February's sub-4 paper, by comparison, had drawn global attention. 'Even if we don't go below four, how exciting is it just to have this attempt?' Kipp said. 'Is it really going to be a failure if she runs, you know, 4:01, 4:02? It's still going to be a big deal. "That's how Eliud Kipchoge's first sub-2 (marathon) attempt was. It wasn't perfect, but it lowered the standard, and it made us realize, if we can get closer we can do it.'