Athletics legend Eliud Kipchoge EGH is among athletes whose artefacts have been included to the Museum of World Athletics.
Kipchoge's gold winning shoes from the 2016 summer Olympics in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil will be on display virtually starting today at the Olympic Athletics Collection room.
The reigning Olympic champion and world record-holder, who is now the world's first sub-2-hour marathon runner has won a medal in each of the Olympic Games he's participated in.
Aged only 20 at the 2004 Athens Olympics, Kipchoge won his first medal at the quadrennial event as he finished third in the 5,000m final behind winner, Moroccan Hicham El Guerrouj and Ethiopian Kenenisa Bekele.
During the 2008 Olympics held in Beijing, China, Kipchoge won a silver medal in the 5000 m event with a time of 13:02.80; although better than the previous Olympic record of 13:05.59, it was not enough to match Kenenisa Bekele's pace, who won the gold medal for this race.
This is not the first time that Kipchoge's Rio Olympic shoe will be displayed in a museum. In 2019, the 2016 Nike Zoom Vaporfly was one of the featured items in the IAAF Heritage World Athletics Championships Exhibition for six months in Doha, Qatar.
The exhibition, the largest ever of its kind, celebrated the history of the World Athletics Championships (formerly IAAF World Athletics Championships) whose first edition took place in Helsinki, Finland, 36 years ago, and which remains to date the third most important global sporting event.
Tokyo Olympics
At this year's Olympics, Kipchoge will be attempting to become only the third man to win back-to-back Olympic marathon gold medals.
No defending Olympic champion has won a second straight marathon gold medal since East German athlete Waldemar Cierpinski did so at Moscow 1980 as the reigning champion from 1976.
Now, more than 40 years later, the 38 year old will attempt to become just the third person, after Cierpinski and Ethiopian legend Abebe Bikila (1960, 1964).
The effort will come nearly two years after becoming the first man to run a marathon distance under two hours, when he completed the INEOS 1:59 Challenge in Vienna, Austria in one hour 59 minutes 40 seconds.
After the INEOS 1:59 Challenge the trainers he wore during that milestone-breaking attempt were enshrined in a museum.
London's Victoria and Albert Museum, an art and design museum, obtained Kipchoge's Nike AlphaFly shoes for a new permanent gallery called "Design 1900-Now" that opened earlier in June.
That is not the only artefact from the run in Vienna that has made headlines recently. Kipchoge was part of Kenya's first major Non Fungible Token (NFT) auction. NFTs are unique digital items stored online on blockchains, similar to cryptocurrency.
The star sold two high-quality videos of his biggest achievements, the Ineos 1:59 run and his 2018 Berlin Marathon world record run as well as a personalised message for around sh. four million.