Jacob Kiplimo who earned a Bronze medal at the Tokyo Olympics in the 10,000m has shown serious talent in recent years, especially at such a young age. He boasts personal bests of 7:26 in the 3000m, 12:48 in the 5000m and 26:33 in the 10,000m. But one personal best that beats all, is his new half marathon record, as well as the 15k World best he broke on route. Beating his fellow Ugandan, Joshua Cheptegei’s previous mark. Kiplimo only turned 21 this month!
The Half marathon World record
Jacob Kiplimo dropped the field early on in the race, running the first 5K mostly solo going through in 13:40. After reaching the 10K mark, he was already over one minute ahead of the chasing pack. At this point we knew something special was going to happen.
However, no one would ever have imagined the pace he went through 15K at… 40:27, which had set him up to shatter 57 minutes for the half marathon, already 48 seconds ahead of the current World record at the time of Kibiwott Kandie. And for the statisticians out there, Kiplimo’s 5k-15K 10K split was a mind-blowing 26:47?!?!
After such an insanely hot pace, Kiplimo did begin to slow substantially and it almost looked as if the World record would end up not being broken. You can see the pain on his face throughout the last 5K of the race. He somehow managed to hold it together to finish 1 second ahead of the previous World record. This comes within a month of Ethiopia’s Letesenbet Gidey smashing the women’s half marathon World record, clocking a time of 1:02:52 on her half marathon debut.
Whats next for Jacob Kiplimo?
So, Kiplimo now has a World record and World best to his name, as well as already being the Half marathon World champion. With him being only 21 it seems hard to believe he will be moving up to the marathon distance just yet. With the World championships next year, it seems he’ll be running the 10,000m and 5000m as he did in Tokyo. We believe he somewhat underperformed in Tokyo and the rest of the 2021 Track season. Therefore we predict Kiplimo will be challenging Joshua Chepetegei for the Gold medal in both distances.
Speaking of Joshua Cheptegei, we also predict Kiplimo will be attempting to break his 10,000m World record and certainly looks like he can run sub 26 minutes for the distance after running a solo 26:37 in the middle of a Half marathon race.