Ian O'Riordan: Do we need to protect the limits of women's distance running?

Irish Times

04-05-2025

These are refreshing and fast-changing times for women's sport, and one Irish athlete swiftly making a name for herself is Niamh Allen.
Her outright victory in the Midleton five-mile road race in Cork on Thursday evening, beating all the women and men, was exceptional on several counts, possibly causing some confusion in the prize-giving ceremony afterwards.
Allen has already been breaking boundaries in Irish women's distance running, ever since returning from two years in Australia last April. Just three months after giving birth to her first child, Lily, she finished second in the National Cross-Country Championships in November, with that winning her first big international vest. She followed that with a victory in the National 10km road race in March, her 31:44 the fastest Irish women's time recorded on Irish soil.
Recently turned 30, Allen now runs with Leevale AC, and Thursday's Midleton race consisted largely of Cork runners, with the usual mixed-race start. In magnificent running conditions, over the latter stages, Allen broke clear of the field, winning by 22 seconds in 25:31, comfortably the best of the 340 finishers, 204 men, and 136 women. Leevale club-mate Michael Walsh was second in 25:53, thus the top men's finisher, ahead of another Leevale runner Donal Coakly, third in 26:24.
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The second-best women's finisher was Siobhán Hoare from Togher, who ran 30:19, and even if Allen's overall victory among the women and men is only a tiny outlier, she is unquestionably an Irish athlete to watch over the next few years. Right now, it seems, there are no limits on her potential.
European Cross Country Championships, Antalya, Turkey, December 2024: Niamh Allen
in the women's senior race. Photograph: Morgan Treacy/Inpho
While Allen's victory also pokes gentle fun at the idea of what women can achieve, it doesn't in any way alter the need, as I see it, to protect the entirely separate women's category. The English FA were the latest sporting body to address that this week, banning all transgender women from the women's game from the beginning of next month.
This follows last month's UK supreme court ruling that the terms 'woman' and 'sex' in the Equality Act refer only to a biological woman and to biological sex. World Athletics has made its stance clear, and other sporting bodies have followed.
It also comes at a time when the marketing people at Nike have dreamed up another idea to test the limits of distance running, this time focusing on the women's mile world record. Inspired in part by a study published in the journal Royal Society Open Science in February, which suggested Faith Kipyegon from Kenya could feasibly run a 3:59.37 mile as soon as this summer, they've set up the sub-four record attempt at the Stade Charléty in Paris on June 26th.
This will also mean improving Kipyegon's world record of 4:07.64, set in 2023, a time no other woman has come within almost five seconds of, but this won't be your normal, or indeed legal, record attempt.
Kipyegon will benefit from reduced aerodynamic drag on the track thanks to improved drafting off male pacemakers, who will be substituted at the halfway point, and will also be racing in whatever new Nike super-spike is being worked on behind closed doors, and therefore not yet legal either.
We all appreciate that Kipyegon is arguably the best women's middle-distance runner of all time, certainly the best I've seen. She's the three-time Olympic 1,500m champion, unbeaten at the distance in four years, and at age 31, and mother to a six-year-old daughter, is showing no signs of slowing down.
It took 34 years of small steps for the women's mile time to improve by almost eight seconds, to that 4:07.64, and now Faith Kipyegon hopes to do the same in one giant leap. Photograph: Getty Images
In the first Diamond League meeting of the season in Xiamen, China last Saturday, she opened with a 1,000m race, clocking a terrific 2:29.21 – just missing the world record of 2:28.98 set by Russia's Svetlana Masterkova back in 1996.
If Kipyegon could somehow have managed to keep going at that 2:29.21 pace for another 609m (to complete the mile distance) she'd have clocked a 4:00.08 mile, still just short of sub-four. But it simply does not work that way: in reality, Kipyegon will need to improve by two seconds per lap, or almost eight seconds overall, compared with the 4:07.64 mile she ran in Monaco in July 2023.
It took 34 years of small steps for the women's mile time to improve by almost eight seconds, to that 4:07.64, and now Kipyegon hopes to do the same in one giant leap. In that same race in Monaco, incidentally, Ciara Mageean broke the Irish women's mile record when running 4:14.58 – the previous mark of 4:17.26 had stood to Sonia O'Sullivan since 1994.
Nike are calling it Breaking4, a sort of sequel to their Breaking2 project, which in 2019 enabled another Kenyan, Eliud Kipchoge, to eclipse the two-hour barrier in the men's marathon, running 1:59:40 – only again that didn't count for record purposes due to the rotation of pacemakers and other such gimmicks.
In a publicity statement for Breaking4, Nike said: 'How do you make the impossible possible? You start by calling your moon shot, and as moonshots go, Faith Kipyegon's is as audacious as they come.'
For Kipyegon, the mile-record attempt is also about inspiring women runners everywhere: 'I want this attempt to say to women, 'you can dream and make your dreams valid',' she said. 'This is the way to go as women, to push boundaries and dream big.'
It's coming up on 71 years since Roger Bannister became the first man to run a sub-four-minute mile, his 3:59.4, on May 6th, 1954, also considered by many to be an impossible task at the time. Once that barrier was broken, many more soon followed. Or as Bannister said, 'Après moi, le déluge.'
Perhaps that's part of Nike's thinking: that if the men have been doing it for more than 70 years, why not the women now, too? But the sub-four mile is one of the last great frontiers of women's running for good reason, and it would be silly and even reckless to suggest it can be broken anytime soon, if at all.
All such records should only be allowed to progress organically, albeit with whatever technological advances are permitted. Otherwise, the boundaries will be pushed beyond what can be achieved under normal circumstances. And what might that encourage, more athletes resorting to doping perhaps?
Sometimes these limits, as with women's sport, need careful protection.