Gravitational Pull

Editor’s note: Eliud Kipchoge’s world tour is carrying him to a marathon on each of the seven continents. When a “celestial body” of that magnitude passes across a city, everything nearby begins to move. Some runners are pulled into his orbit, desperate to touch the star. Others simply run their own marathon, held on their own course. Photographer Thiago Ribeiro went to Porto Alegre to track the pull.

I raced in Porto Alegre once before, in 2017, chasing a Boston qualifier. I never imagined I would come back to photograph Eliud Kipchoge on the same streets. For him, the return carried weight too. This is the country where he won his first Olympic gold, at Rio 2016, and Porto Alegre was the second stop on his world tour after Cape Town, with Melbourne next. 

In a country deeply divided by social inequality and recent political polarisation, a shared love for a soccer team makes everyone feel part of a collective whole. Soccer dominates everything around here, from conversations at bar tables to every conceivable news outlet. At the same time, this “monoculture” fosters a collective blindness toward other sports. It is against this backdrop that road running has been gaining significant ground in Brazil. The cultural differences between the two sports could well be the subject of a doctoral thesis, but perhaps one of the most striking distinctions is the absence of an “idol culture” in running, unlike in soccer. In soccer, by contrast, people know the entire roster of every team, and virtually no player goes unnoticed. In running, few people know the name of Brazil’s top marathoner today and fewer still know that Ronaldo da Costa was the first man to run a marathon under a pace of three minutes per kilometre, breaking the world record to win the 1998 Berlin Marathon in 2:06:05. Having this in mind helps us better understand the “Kipchoge effect” in Brazil, as well as the significance of what he represents for the sport, not only globally but also within the country itself.

Known to Brazilians by his nickname “Kip”, the GOAT has an aura that is hard to describe. Everyone had entered to run the marathon, but really they had come to run with Kipchoge, to breathe the same race and, if they could, to touch him. Brazilians carry something particular in that. When we have an idol we want to reach out and make contact, and here it tipped into something close to mania. A member of his team told me he couldn’t even take his breakfast in peace, because people found his hotel and simply waited. Even with a media pass, it was hard to get a clean frame of him, and after he crossed the line I saw a crush I had never witnessed before.

The city went all in to bring him here. That ambition didn’t always reach the race itself, which had its share of organisational problems, but the pull of his name was undeniable. 

Some of the pictures that surprised me most came from the dullest event of the week. A press conference is usually the most boring thing to shoot; people sit, they answer questions, and that is all you are handed. Everything stays in the same place for hours, with no change of scenery. So I went in close, played with some light and tried to draw his personality out from there. The smile, the sparkle in the eyes of someone who is definitely born to inspire. 

His schedule was guarded so tightly that following him took real effort. After an evening event on a large stage he opened up to sign whatever people brought hoping for his autograph, and that was where I finally caught what I had flown here for: him and the crowd, meeting. At one point he reached down, lifted a child up beside him and signed something while his team signalled that it was time to move. This is where I looked at Kipchoge’s face and it seems like he could stay there forever, autographing, smiling, taking selfies. 

The other half of what I shot has nothing to do with Kipchoge. It is the ordinary runners: faces in close-up, small details, people down on the ground, the hurt of the marathon. I work on intuition first and find the reasons afterwards. What I try to do is watch everything around me, not only the obvious thing. There is the finish line that everyone is pointed towards, and then there is the other side that nobody is looking at, and that is where I go.

On a wet day, the finish was where it all landed. Not the clock stopping, but the minutes after: the slow walk, the crowd closing in, the emotion. Those few minutes were worth more to me than the whole race. Being a runner myself, I feel those moments a little. I know what they are going through, and I know how it hurts. 

Photography is a second life for me. Eight years ago I was a lawyer, and a frustrated one. Running was my escape, and I threw myself at it, loading more than 100km a week, chasing faster times until it became a neurotic obsession. I don’t need to escape anymore, because now the work itself is something I love. I would call myself a documentary photographer. I shoot life as raw as it comes, and what I love most is the meeting point of sport and street, everything that happens around a great event rather than only the race inside it. Porto Alegre was exactly that.