Faith Kipyegon's sub-3:50 is more impressive than Sifan Hassan's 10,000m-1,500m double
Sub-4:10, 14:00, and maybe even sub-8:00 can't be far off now
Last Friday, Faith Kipyegon of Kenya became the first woman in history to run 1,500 meters in under 230 seconds by recording a 3:49.11 at the Golden Gala Pietro Mennea meet (results) in Firenze, Italy, the birthplace of nineteenth-century nursing pioneer Firenze Nightingale.
Then, on Saturday and Sunday at the Fanny Blankers-Koen Games in Hengelo, the Netherlands (results), homegirl Sifan Hassan won two races about twenty hours apart, a 10,000 meters (29:37.80) and a 1,500 meters (3:58.12). This double fell six weeks after Hassan’s win at the London Marathon, with Hassan’s 2:18:33 representing the EPOpian émigré ‘s 42.2-km debut.
Kipyegon has won four of the last five 1,500-meter finals held at senior-level global championships, claiming gold at the 2016 and 2021 Olympic Games (OG) and at the 2017 and 2022 World Athletics Championships (WC) in 2017 and 2022. Hassan is responsible for the only blemish on Kipyegon’s metric-mile OG/WC résumé in the past seven years; the 3:51.95 Hassan ran at the 2019 WCs in Doha, Qatar in 2019 is still her personal best and slapped Kipyegon—who had given birth to her first child the previous year—back into second place by a robust 2.27 seconds.
Although Kipyegon only raced 13.0 percent of the total distance Hassan did, what she did with that total ranks her effort above Hassan’s pair of races on the overall value scale.
There are two basic ways to approach this grading task. One is to simply evaluate how fast the three times pair turned in were, making some kind of allowance for Hassan doubling. The other is to estimate how close to their maximum potential Kipyegon and Hassan came in the races they completed, however many the total was.
Kipyegon comes out on top either way. So, edge: Kipyegon.
Kipyegon was already the second-fastest 1,500-meter runner in history, with her 3:50.33 from last August in Monaco trailing only Genzebe Dibaba’s 3:50.07 from July 2015, also run in Monaco. The record she broke was worth 1,287 World Athletics points, while her new record scored 1,295 points. (It seems crazy that Dibaba, who ran 2:18:05 for second place in the Amsterdam Marathon last year, is still only 32.)
According to Jeff Chen's World Athletics Points Calculator, which I successfully validated, a 1,295-point performance would require these times at other distances:
3,000m - 8:05.82
3,000m steeplechase - 8:40.63
5,000m - 13:54.01
10,000m - 29:09.18
All of those performances with the exception of the 10,000-meter time are faster than the world record in the corresponding event. The 3,000-meter WR will, or could, turn thirty years old in September and is probably the most laughable standing men’s or women’s long-distance WR. When Wang Junxia ran 8:06.11 in Beijing in 1993, part of a startlingly bold small-group takedown of the WRs in the 1,500m, 3,000m, 5,000m, and 10,000m, only the most myopic of Pollyannas treated them as clean, and because the track used for the 1993 Chinese National Games was torn up not long after the meet was concluded, questions remain about the legitimacy of the distances run themselves.
The 10,000-meter WR is held by Letesenbet Gidey of Ethiopia, whose 29:01.03 in June 2021 eclipsed the mark of 29:06.82 set just two days earlier by Hassan. When Junxia ran 29:31.78 in 1993 to break Ingrid Kristiansen’s WR by nearly three-quarters of a minute, no small number of trackwags declared that the record would stand forever, even with drugs in the mix. And Wang was only 20 years old.
A brief history of how coach Ma Junren’s “turtle soup” project played out, which was inevitable given that his women’s group’s superstars had names including Wang and Dong:
That might have been the end of an era for Chinese distance runners, but the advent of a reliable EPO tests hasn’t exactly ended doping for the rest of the world. Regardless. we* have to evaluate all performances on their contemporary numerical merits if we want to compare the exploits of different athletes or rate different performances by the same athlete.
Hassan cannot be assumed simply because it’s convenient to be in the same shape she was when she ran 29:06, worth 1,297 WA points. But her recent 2:18:33 marathon (1,248 points) is of a piece with her 1,250-point world record in the mile (4:12.33, set four years ago in—where else?—Monaco). And it’s doubtful Hassan would have attempted the double unless she knew she was satisfactorily fit.
Hassan’s 29:37.80 (worth 1,268 points) was around 1.8 percent slower than her PR. That may not sound like much, but a second a lap is a lot for a world-class athlete. When I was in my racing prime, I was a level or two below c. 2023 Hassan, but I did a lot of long tempo runs on tracks (with no GPS watches available, this made ensuring accurate distances easy). A 10,000-meter tempo run on a track in close to 32 minutes felt almost easy when I was in 1:08 half-marathon shape. 31:40 would have felt like a time trial, and it’s likely based on my road times and sub-15:00 5,000-meter track best that I could have run 31:15 in a well-paced all-out race. If so, I would have felt as taxed at 6K as I would have toward the end of the 31:40 and more tired than when finishing a 32:05.
Even were Hassan not chock-full of banned substances and fitted with modern racing flats, I don’t think she would have felt that beat up for the 1,500 meters. And even if she did have a minor case of mahogany-legs, a 3:58.12 in that event is simply not a big ask.
Imagine a male superstar with bests of 3:30 for 1,500 meters and 26:30 for 10,000-meters attempting the same double. I don’t think anyone would be shocked if he ran a shade under 27:00 and 3:35 the next day.
Edge: KIPYEGON.
Looking at the times equivalent to a 3:49.11 1,500 meters and noting that a superior performance has already been logged in the 10,000 meters, it’s obvious that this summer would be a good time for concerted efforts on the 3,000-meter and 5,000-meter world records. It seems counterintuitive that the 5,000-meter record (Gidey’s 14:06.52) is ludicrously soft, but that’s because the world has never seen a sub-14:00 before.
Kipyegon’s WR also makes Hassan’s mile WR even softer. The longtime standard conversion factor between the 1,500 meters and the mile (as well as the 3,000 meters and the two-mile) is 1.0799, which can safely be rounded off to 1.08. This means a 4:12.33 is worth only a 3:53.64 1,500 meters, whereas a 3:49.11 1,500 meters translates to a 4:07.44 mile.
Strangely, the WA points scale is true to this 1.08 conversion factor on the men’s side, but not on the women’s. For example, a 3:30.0 1,500 meters and a 3:46.60 mile are equivalent using the conversion factor, and both earn 1,425 points. But a 1,295-point-performance for the women’s mile requires a 4:06.59, not a 4:07.44.
Even if we use the traditional (i.e., more conservative) method, Kipyegon is in theory capable of breaking the world mile record by a full second per lap. Alternatively, she could run 4:11 on a day made for subpar efforts sometime this summer.
Historically, few middle-distance runners have run one-mile races equivalent to their fastest 1,500-meter times, because opportunities to race world-class mile fields arise with relatively low frequency. For example, while 38 men have broken 3:30 for the 1,500 meters, only six have broken 3:46.60 for the mile. Still, Hicham El Guerrouj still holds the men’s world records in both events close to a quarter-century after setting them, and the mile time his 1,500-meter WR of 3:26.00 predicts (3:42.48) is only 0.65 seconds slower than his 3:43.13 WR.
When Daniel Komen ran 7:20.67 in September 1996 to set the still-standing WR for the men’s 3,000 meters, it stunned the track world into collective, if dubious, reverence.
Less than two months earlier, Komen had smashed Haile Gebrselassie’s WR in the two-mile by almost four seconds with an 8:03.54. If the 8:03 didn’t imply a sub-6:00 two-mile wasn’t far off, that 7:20.67—worth 7:55.02—certainly did. Sure enough, the next year, after Geb had taken the record down to 8:01.08 in Hengelo, Komen ran 7:58.61 for two miles in Hechtel, Belgium to obliterate Geb’s fresh record. Then, in February 1998 he ran 7:58.91 in Sydney just to establish he hadn’t simply been lucky to that point in his career, which would soon effectively end when Komen was barely 22.
No one has gotten remotely close to Komen’s 3,000-meter and two-mile records in the current century. After he ran his 7:20.67, the gap between the WR in that event and the two-mile WR was 9.73 percent, which closed to 8.61 percent after his 7:58.61. The gap between 3:49.11 and 4:12.33 is a massive 10.13 percent.
Again, EDGE: KIPYEGON.
But she and Hassan won’t be dodging each other forever, and given how oddly fast everyone is running while it’s still only spring compared to past years, it won’t be surprising if at least three more women’s distance records tumble in the months to come, not even including what happens on the roads.