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Valencia (Spain) (AFP)
Joshua Cheptegei broke the world record of 10,000 meters on the track on Wednesday in Valencia with a time of 26min 11.00 seconds.
It dropped the previous mark of 26min 17.53sec set by Kenenisa Bekele in 2005 in Brussels.
This was the 24-year-old 10,000m world champion’s third world record this year and cemented his position as the new middle distance master.
In February he claimed the world record for 5km on the road in Monaco.
Then, after a period of coronavirus lockdown in his native Uganda, he returned to Monaco and, in his first run back, erased nearly two seconds of Bekele’s world record time of 16 years on the track above 5,000m while it ticked 12 minutes 35.35 seconds. .
Cheptegei gave notice of his class when he took silver at the 2017 world championships in London while he was still 20 years old.
Last year was better, collecting gold in Doha. He had already won the world cross-country championship five months earlier.
As of Wednesday, Cheptegei had only the 18th fastest time in the distance with a best in Doha of 26 minutes 48.36 seconds, more than half a minute off the record.
But his performance in August boded well and he was assisted by some fast pacemakers, notably Kenyan Nicholas Kimeli, who was a 5,000-meter world finalist.
Another factor was her footwear, the Nike Carbon-plated Nike Vaporfly worn by Ethiopian Letesenbet Gidey when she set a new one for women 5,000 meters earlier.
© 2020 AFP
