The Brit stunned the world in 1984 by breaking the marathon world record at the Chicago Marathon
Forty years ago on October 21, 1984, Steve Jones made history by winning the Chicago Marathon in 2:08:05 – his first-ever completed marathon. In doing so, the Welshman broke the world record.
The race was initially anticipated to be a showdown between two marathon greats: Olympic champion Carlos Lopes and reigning world champion Rob de Castella. However, it was Jones, an RAF mechanic, who stole the spotlight.
The 29-year-old at the time broke De Castella’s world record of 2:08:18, set in Fukuoka, Japan, by 13 seconds.
Steve Jones’ Record-Breaking Marathon
What made Jones’ feat even more impressive was his lack of awareness that he was on record-breaking pace. Unlike today’s runners, who usually rely on watches, Jones ran without a watch. He only learned he was on track for a world record with two miles remaining in the race.
The two-time Olympian had attempted his marathon debut a year earlier at the 1983 Chicago Marathon but was forced to withdraw at 17.5 miles due to an ankle injury.
His world record stood until April 1985, when Carlos Lopes set a new mark of 2:07:12 at the Rotterdam Marathon.
Despite losing the record, Jones remained a dominant force in marathon running. In the same year Lopes set a new record, Jones won the London Marathon in 2:08:16, despite making a stop for the toilet mid-race.
Steve Jones (Getty)
Later in 1985, Jones returned to Chicago and ran 2:07:13 – just one second shy of Lopes’ world record.
Although he missed out on the world record, this time he set a British record, which stood for an impressive 33 years. It wasn’t until 2018 that Mo Farah finally broke it, clocking 2:05:11, also in Chicago.
In 1988, he set a course record of 2:08:20 to win the New York City Marathon. The year prior, he finished second at the Boston Marathon.
In total, Jones competed in 18 marathons, winning five major titles: Chicago in 1984 and 1985, London in 1985, New York in 1988, and Toronto in 1992.
To celebrate the 40-year anniversary, you can find our original coverage from Steve Jones’ world record via the Athletics Weekly archive.
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Steve Jones and the Ongoing Debate Between Creationism and Evolution
At the point when Darwin’s Starting point of Species was distributed in 1859 it didn’t take long for reasonable scholars, similar to Cardinal John Henry Newman, to acknowledge advancement as a component of God’s provision. Yet, right up to the present day Christianity stays split between creationist “neats,” who read Beginning in a real sense, and non-simpleton “scruffies,” who consider Beginning to be a fantasy or a sonnet.
There is fundamentalism on the two sides of the separation. While creationists read the Holy book as a cosmological course reading, essayists like Richard Dawkins treat development as a hypothesis of everything — which is the reason we have conflicted in broad daylight.
I have consistently, nonetheless, been a sharp admirer of the Darwinist teacher Steve Jones, who is a prominent researcher and a skilled essayist. Jones is teacher of hereditary qualities and top of the science division at College School, London. We met as of late at his office in the Galton Research center behind Euston station to talk Darwinism.
Jones went to sentence structure school on the Wirral however left at 16 to turn into an understudy fitter at the Unilever cleanser production line previously, through night school, going to Edinburgh College to understand zoology. He is the main scientist to have had the chutzpah to “update” Darwin.
He did it in his book Practically Like a Whale, and to commend the Darwin bicentenary he has drawn out another book, Darwin’s Island, which looks at Darwin’s less-known explores into English widely varied vegetation.
Dawkins wrote in The God Fancy: “The main distinction between The Da Vinci Code and the stories of good news is that the good news accounts are old fiction while The Da Vinci Code is current fiction.” Jones, with a more scholarly foundation and reasonableness, knows not to balance logical reality with informal fiction as a definitive trial of truth and misrepresentation (no truthtelling in Shakespeare, or Dostoyevsky?). However he is as of late on record as demanding, provocatively, that human development “has reached a conclusion.”
It appeared to me an odd comment when there’s such a spate of hypothesis on the eventual fate of human improvement because of advances in biotechnology.
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