Komen Capital (Pty)

The Komen Capital name was inspired by a young Kenyan runner who had never raced outside his own country and whom few outside his country had ever heard of. In 1996 and 1997 Daniel Komen put together the two most astonishing years of distance running the world has ever seen, winning dozens of races against top-flight competition and setting numerous world records, some of which are still on the books. No athlete has ever done what he did over a two-year period. He didn't know any limits, was an uninhibited runner, had no fear of times or other runners and he didn't understand what it was to be nervous before a race. In July 1997 he travelled to Hechtel, Belgium, to make a bid for the two-mile world record, which Gebrselassie had lowered to 8:01.10 earlier that year. Komen ran the first mile of the two-mile race in 3:59.4. That's exactly the time Roger Bannister posted when he ran history's first sub-four-minute mile in 1954. And then Komen did it again, running a second 3:59.4 mile to set a new world record of 7:58.61 and become the first human to run back-to-back sub-four miles. He remains the only sub-eight-minute two-miler today. The milestone, symbolic of how far human performance had progressed in the second half of the 20th century, elicited surprisingly little fanfare. In fact, the only media attention devoted to the breakthrough concerned the lack of media attention.