WHAT KIPCHOGE
WEARS

Twenty-eight marathons, five wardrobes

Kipchoge has run 26 official marathons and two exhibitions, all of them in Nike, and he has worn five different kinds of kit doing it. Which one depends on whose race it is.

Until 2016 he ran city marathons in plain Nike athlete kit, a singlet with a swoosh and nothing else: royal blue in London in 2015, light blue in Berlin that autumn, grey stripes in London in 2016. From 2017 to 2025 it was the kit of the NN Running Team, white with an orange roundel. In 2026 the same team has a new name and a new singlet, orange and yellow. At three Olympic Games he wore Kenya's national kit. And on three occasions Nike built him something that existed once.

We checked the wardrobe against a photograph for 15 of the 28 and assigned the rest by era. The chart says which is which.

The team on his chest

The NN Running Team was launched in April 2017 by Global Sports Communication, the Dutch agency that manages him, as the first professional team in distance running, and Nike has supplied it from the start. That is why the most photographed marathon runner of his era spent his best years with an insurance company's roundel on his chest, next to the swoosh.

The photograph above is the kit at its most recognisable, and every part of it can be dated. The white singlet and white ribbed arm sleeves are the 2022 team issue. The orange on his legs carries the word INEOS, because the chemicals group signed a performance partnership with Kipchoge and the team on 12 January 2022. A year later, in Berlin again, the singlet had orange bands fading up from the hem.

On 1 January 2026 the team became the dsm-firmenich Running Team. NN Group stayed on as founding partner, Nike stayed on as main partner and team supplier, and the singlet changed colour: in Porto Alegre in July he raced in an orange and yellow marbled top with the new three-circle logo. He is still the first name on the roster. We follow the team season by season in The History of the NN Running Pro Elite Team, NN Running Pro Elite Team 2022 and dsm-firmenich Pro Elite 2026.

The Kenya vest

At the Olympics the team kit stays at home. He won in Rio in 2016 in a red Kenya singlet with a flag patch, and in Sapporo in 2021 in a red and black geometric pattern with green accents. Both were made by Nike, which has supplied Athletics Kenya and the Kenyan Olympic committee since 1993 under a deal that runs to 2028. The Tokyo-cycle design was mocked at home as honeycomb and cobweb when the pictures came out; he won by 80 seconds in it, the widest margin since 1972.

In April 2024 he modelled the next Kenya kit at Nike's Olympic launch in Paris. The race itself, in August, was the one marathon he has not finished: his last timing split came at 30 kilometres. The federation side of his wardrobe is in The History of Athletics in Kenya and Kenya 2024.

The one-offs: Monza, Vienna, New York

Breaking2, at Monza on 6 May 2017, came with a kit cut from each runner's body scan: a seamless knitted singlet, short tights and arm sleeves with a textured surface Nike called Aeroblade, and strips of the same material taped to the lower legs. His was red. He ran 2:00:25, which was never eligible for ratification.

Vienna, on 12 October 2019, was all white. The 1:59:40.2 he ran there behind 41 pacemakers was not a record either, and he ran it in a prototype of a shoe that did not yet exist in shops.

The third one-off is the least known. For his New York debut in November 2025 Nike adapted a trail top for him, the open-mesh Radical AirFlow, with two extra vents at the ribs at his request, a full-length hem and a closer drape, patterned from body scans at the LeBron James Innovation Center. That is the same building where Nike made Keely Hodgkinson's one-of-one speed suit a year later.

The shoes: prototypes first

With Kipchoge the shoes usually arrived on his feet before they arrived anywhere else. In Berlin in 2015 he raced a prototype flat whose insoles worked loose from the first mile and flapped at his ankles; he ran 2:04:00 regardless. In Rio a year later all three medallists wore the same disguised Vaporfly prototype.

Then the sequence everyone knows. The Vaporfly Elite at Monza in 2017. A 3D-printed Flyprint upper for London in 2018, and an updated Vaporfly 4% with a Flyknit upper for the 2:01:39 in Berlin that September. The Vaporfly NEXT% in London in 2019, a prototype Alphafly in Vienna that October, the orange Alphafly NEXT% 2 for the 2:01:09, and an early Alphafly 3 in Berlin in 2023, raced inside the official development window.

Vienna changed the rules. On 31 January 2020 World Athletics capped road shoes at a 40 mm sole and one rigid plate, and required a shoe to have been on open sale for four months before it could be raced; the V&A, which holds a retail Alphafly, links that rule directly to his run. Under today's rules the prototypes he wore in Rio and Vienna could not be used in an Olympic marathon. Nike launched the Alphafly 4 on 17 September 2026, and nothing says he has raced it yet. For the majority of his marathons the shoe model is not on record at all.

What he holds today

He holds no world record today. Sabastian Sawe ran 1:59:30 in London on 26 April 2026, ratified that July, with Yomif Kejelcha second in 1:59:41, both of them in adidas. That makes two men under two hours in a legal race, and it means the Vienna run is no longer the fastest anyone has covered the distance. Kipchoge's 2:01:09 is now fifth on the all-time list. How the record passed from one brand to the other is the subject of Adidas Pro Elite 2018.

What stays his: two Olympic marathon titles, which only Abebe Bikila and Waldemar Cierpinski can match, five wins in Berlin, 16 wins from 26 official starts, and the fact of having been the first to run the distance in under two hours at all.

He is 41 and still racing, though no longer to win. After New York in 2025 he told The Star: “It's not a retirement, but a transition.” The transition is a tour of seven marathons on seven continents for his foundation: 16th in Cape Town in May 2026, 12th in Porto Alegre in July, Melbourne on 11 October, and Antarctica at the end.

What you can and cannot buy

Nike has sold four collections under his name since 2020, the latest, No Human Is Limited, timed for New York in 2025; EK Umoja in 2023 printed his 2003 world title time inside the shoes. Every shoe he set a record in reached retail after the race. And the team runs its own fan shop, with training wear, a Kipchoge line and the Maurten race bottle.

One thing we expected to write here turned out to be wrong. Team race kit is not always unavailable: for the 2025 season the team sold a Race Singlet at US$102, a Nike Dri-FIT ADV replica of the race design with the NN, Nike and INEOS logos. It is gone from the 2026 shop, and there is no dsm-firmenich equivalent. What never reaches a shop is the garment issued to the athlete, along with the one-offs and the prototypes.

Those surface second-hand, or at auction. In 2021 a charity sale for his foundation was reported to have sold his 2018 NN Running Team singlet for EUR 1,893. The pieces below are not his. They are team issue from the same seasons, and three of them you can find in the Berlin photograph.

Team issue · in the archiveINEOS X Nike NN Pro Elite 2020/2021 Racing ShortsTeam orange with the white INEOS wordmark on the leg, issued to NN Running Team athletes for 2021 and 2022: the split-short cut of the orange he wore in Berlin.120,00 €View piece →

Team issue · in the archiveNike NN Running Team Pro Elite 2022 Arm SleevesWhite ribbed sleeves with neon orange and grey, the 2022 team issue, made in the USA.150,00 €View piece →

Team equipment · in the archiveOfficial NN Running Team Maurten RacebottleThe 400 ml bottle the team uses on the elite drinks tables. The least expensive way into the rail.20,00 €View piece →

How issue kit differs from a replica is set out in What Is Pro Elite Clothing?, and the races he built his career on in The Berlin Marathon and The World Marathon Majors Explained.