As Jacob Kiplimo prepares to make his much-anticipated marathon debut at the London Marathon on April 27, one of his earliest mentors, Italian coach Giuseppe Giambrone, has reflected on the prodigious talent that first convinced him the Ugandan could one day challenge the two-hour barrier in the marathon.
“For Jacob, it’s normal,” said Giambrone in an interview with Athletics Weekly, recalling Kiplimo’s stunning world half marathon record run in Barcelona earlier this year.
But for the coach, who first discovered Kiplimo in Uganda in 2015, the brilliance on display today was evident nearly a decade ago.
Giambrone found Kiplimo in the high-altitude region of Kween, near Mount Elgon, where he had been scouting for talent beyond the traditional powerhouses of Kenya and Ethiopia.
Kiplimo was just 14 at the time and the youngest of four brothers introduced to Giambrone. While the others, including Victor Kiplangat and Robert Chemonges, had already made names for themselves in mountain running, it was the quiet and unassuming Kiplimo who quickly began to stand out.
In 2016, Giambrone brought Kiplimo and his brothers to his training base in San Rocco a Pilli, just outside Siena, Italy.
There, in the Tuscan hills, Kiplimo’s progression stunned the Italian coach. Just months into the program, the then 15-year-old was matching and exceeding the efforts of older and more experienced athletes during progressive runs on a course featured in the Gladiator film.
One particular run in April 2016 remains etched in Giambrone’s memory. Kiplimo clocked back-to-back 3:01 kilometres on a four-percent incline to end a one-hour session — an effort that would have equated to a pace well under 2:45/km on flat terrain. When Giambrone took his lactate reading, it returned a remarkably low 1.9 mmol/l — a physiological marker suggesting Kiplimo could sustain that pace for an hour, covering over a half marathon, without lactic buildup.
“At 15, without carbon shoes, that was enough for me to believe he could one day run a sub-two-hour marathon,” Giambrone said. “I spoke with people and said, ‘In the future, 1:58, 1:59 is possible,’ but Jacob was only 15 years old.”
In the months that followed, Kiplimo finished third in the 10,000m at the World U20 Championships and, still aged 15, became Uganda’s youngest Olympian at the Rio 2016 Games. The accolades continued to pile up: world and Olympic medals, Commonwealth titles, and eventually the world half marathon record.
Though Kiplimo left Giambrone’s training camp in 2019 to return to Uganda and is now coached by Iacopo Brasi, he still refers to Giambrone as “father”. The Italian coach, who insists on working directly with his athletes to maintain training integrity, said he remains proud but is not surprised by Kiplimo’s rise.
Now 24, Kiplimo will line up in London almost exactly nine years after Giambrone first saw him in Uganda — a teenager who, even then, seemed destined to redefine the boundaries of distance running.
