What Did Faith Kipyegon's "Moonshot" Say About Gender?

I had some thoughts about the Faith (and Nike's) Breaking4 Event

Welcome to My So-Called Feminist Life: Essays, interviews, and book reviews that wrestle with what it means to be a feminist today. This week, I had some thoughts on Faith Kipyegon and Nike’s Breaking4 event.

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“Moonshot” Creative Commons

My ears perked up — and my cynicism, too — when I heard that Nike was backing Faith Kipyegon, the fastest woman miler in the world, to attempt to break the 4 minute mile. At first, I imagined this meant they’d invest in her and support her, until she brought the world record down from her current 4:07. It sounded like belief in women’s capabilities might finally be shifting. That the powers that be were finally waking up to the fact that the “performance gap” between men and women athletes is not entirely biological but also has so much to do with investment, support, training, coaching, medical care, and mental belief of what women are capable of. I, for one, am very curious to see what women athletes are capable of, if and when they finally start being believed in and treated with the care and respect men who happen to be athletes are by default.

But then I saw the whole thing was a big Nike spectacle planned to happen in a matter of months, and I don’t know, I lost a little bit of interest. It felt kind of like a commercial for Nike and not a real attempt at an athletic feat — and I also felt highly skeptical that even the fastest woman in the world could shave 7-plus seconds off of a world record she set two years ago.

Here’s an interesting thing that I researched while writing my book: Roger Bannister first broke the 4 minute mile in 1954 and that was a spectacle in and of itself, (not like a Nike funded one at a huge stadium in Paris) but the world had been watching him. For years, Bannister and a handful of other elite runners in the world kept getting so close to the 4-minute mark, but the record felt like an impenetrable brick wall.

When he finally did break the record, he did so with his two good friends who paced him, and he had trained specifically for the record for months and months prior. (So many intervals!!) But the interesting thing to me was what happened after the record was broken. Even though the mile record had been stagnant for years before Bannister broke 4:00, just 46 days later, the new record was broken again, by John Landy, an Australian who’d also been hovering just over 4 minutes for years as well. The record continued to be chipped away at then, so that by the end of the century, less than 50 years later, it was down to 3:43.13, the current World Record, held by Morocco’s Hicham el Guerrouj. Once they barreled through the wall, it seemed, the mental block for the entire sport was lifted.

In any case, just a few weeks after Bannister made worldwide headlines about how he changed everything for mankind, etc., Diane Leather, a college student in Birmingham, England, became the first woman to record a sub-5 minute mile. Immediately, the two became linked and somehow the narrative around Leather became very similar to Bannister’s. Newspapers harped on about how women had been chasing the 5-minute mile just as long as men had been chasing the 4-minute mark. Which wasn’t true at all. After all, Leather’s 5-minute mile wasn’t even an official world record. World Athletics (then known as the International Amateur Athletics Federation) the world governing body for track and field, didn’t even keep records for women for any distance greater than 1,000 meters at the time! Her sub-5 minute mile was only the second time ever that she’d competed in the distance at all. Within a year, Leather had lowered the women’s mile record to 4:45, without pace runners, or even any type of particular training for that specific distance.

My point here is that when we compare men’s and women’s mile records there’s so often this sense that we know exactly how big the “natural” gulf is between the two, but the context of how these records came to be, and when they were even allowed to be kept, and who was allowed to even try, and what they thought they were even trying for, well, all of it really really matters.

So, of course, last week, I watched Breaking4. I streamed it on my laptop and watched the whole hour of hype and back story before the race because I was so curious how the framing of this was going to go. I did not love that the whole idea that a woman would ever break the 4-minute mile was “the impossible,” but I did appreciate that one of the announcers noted that most of the pacers running with her would be men, and not just any men, some of the most elite middle-distance runners in the world. “You have a woman trying to break the 4 minute mile, you need to get elite men to help her. In sport you just don’t see that,” he said.

This is notable for one, because, when women run with male pacers World Athletics says that those times don’t count toward women’s world records, because running next to a man “artificially” speeds you up… which actually doesn’t make any sense unless you truly believe that men and women are different species or something. You run as fast as you run, and yes a fast pacer might impact your speed, but so does the wind, and so does your mindset, and how much sleep you got last night, and your genetics, etc. etc. etc. But anyway, World Athletics has these rules for women in international competition that are not really about keeping things “fair” or “competitive” or whatever they want to say they are for: The rules are for making sure we only ever see women athletes as inferior to male athletes and that the two types of athletes will never ever be anywhere close to one another in terms of performance.

But, as we saw here, with Faith and her cadre of male pacers, (they included two women in the pacers group but only for the first two laps, there’s a lot more to say about this, but I didn’t love the optics!) elite men and women are really not so different as we think, and just having the opportunity to see them run together, on the same track, in pursuit of something together… that’s not something you get to see in track and field, or even other professional sports, hardly ever.

You know by now, I’m sure, that Faith didn’t break the 4-minute mark this time, but we all know that doesn’t mean she never will, or that no one ever will. Seventy-one years ago many people didn’t think women were capable of racing in a mile at all, let alone breaking the 5-minute mark, until Leather did it. Kipyegon is a phenomenal talent — she tore the mile world record off its hinges in 2023 to bring it from 4:12.33 to 4:07.64 — and hearing her speak about how big the mental game is when it comes to setting these records gives me more reason to believe she will keep chipping away at it. “I think I have proved it will be possible. If it is not me, it will be somebody else,” she said after catching her breath from running a mile faster than any woman and 99.9999995% of men on the planet have ever run.

And yes, I know, the entire spectacle is also a ploy to sell us more Nike merchandise, (and I’m sure to kind of rehab their image from not having the best record in terms of treating women runners well), but as Nike does, they also did a good job of making it seem like it was also about dreams and human potential — because, running is kind of about that. Yes, I did write a whole book about this, basically.

Also it was heartening to see that people were excited about this. They paid attention! Track and field does not often get the kind of buzz and eyeballs outside of an Olympics that this attempt got, which is certainly a win in terms of overall growth and respect for women’s sports. As feminism and ideas about what women can and should do with their bodies continues to spiral backwards, and people all over the world are pushed out of sport altogether because they don’t conform to some antiquated ideal we have about gender, Faith’s willingness to put herself out there and show what an incredible athlete she is and what gender barriers are really made of is important.

After the race, when asked what message she had for the girls and women watching at home, Faith said straightforwardly: “We are not limited. We can limit ourselves with our thoughts, but we can try everything in our lives and prove that we are strong.”

And I truly dream of a sporting world that believes this. We are not limited. But if we continue on this path that sex is a binary and that there is some inherent physical advantage that all men hold over all women (please see above about the 99.9999995%) and transgender athletes are a threat to all we hold dear, well then we will continue to be very much limited in society when it comes to women.

There is so much about sport history that shows that women have always been and will always be more capable than any governing body or system at large wants us to be. So, yeah, Breaking4 was cool to witness, just as an act of belief.

But I can’t help but wish that, if they (Nike, I guess I mean, but also whoever else has power in the sporting world) are gonna do these “moonshots” to show how incredible the human body is and how we are all limitless and maybe the gender binary in sports isn’t all it has seemed to be — especially when talking about this kind of spectacle that’s outside of the rigid control of World Athletics — I dunno, maybe they could put some of that power behind supporting athletes who have been left behind by this model altogether.

What about a moonshot spectacle for Caster Semenya, or any of the other athletes who have been forced out of World Athletics races because the bodies they were born with aren’t considered “fair”? What about a Pride Month race only for trans and nonbinary track athletes? What about a co-ed all-comers steeplechase-style run or ultra race? What about funding and supporting multisport athletes to the end of one day actually having an Olympic women’s decathlon?

I mean, if we’re going to shoot for the moon, why not imagine a universe that’s better, more inclusive, more celebratory, than the one we have now?

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Upcoming Events

I’m mostly lying low this summer, writing about the… well… atrocities we are living through, taking care of my kids, and plotting some new projects. Stay tuned. That said, if you are looking for a speaker or want me to come to your book club or run a writing workshop for you, feel free to reach out! And if you’re in Seattle, come check out this great running-related event I’ll be doing in a couple weeks.

July 17, 7:00 PM, Elliott Bay Book Co., Seattle

Essayist, sports writer, and host of the Creative Nonfiction podcast Brendan O'Meara visits the store to discuss his new book, The Front Runner: The Life of Steve Prefontaine, an essential reappraisal of his life and legacy, a powerful work of narrative history exploring the forces and psychology that made the American Track and Field icon great and separating the man from the myths, 50 years after his tragic death in a car crash. O'Meara is joined in conversation by Maggie Mertens, author of Better Faster Farther: How Running Changed Everything We Know About Women.

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Thanks for reading! My So-Called Feminist Life is a newsletter wrestling with feminism in today’s world. I encourage conversation in the comments if you wish to share your own thoughts, feelings, memories, opinions. If you’d like to support this project financially, you can become a paid subscriber.

You can find me on Instagram: @maggiejmertens and on BlueSky @maggiemertens.bsky.social

You can order my book Better, Faster, Farther: How Running Changed Everything We Know About Women (Algonquin Books) from your favorite local bookstore, request it from your local library, or push this quick order button from Bookshop.org. If you’ve read it, I’d love if you’d leave it a glowing review at Amaz*n or Go*dReads.