On the face of it, running is one of the purest and simplest sports on the planet. His design took two weeks for local workers to complete - "they thought I was nuts" - before it was undone and returned to normal 12 days later. Ketchell's solution was to dig up the roundabout and start again, turning the -2% camber into a +1% one. Good for taking rainwater away from a tourist attraction, terrible for a marathon runner trying to make an about turn while travelling at 13mph. The presence of a historic building in its centre meant that the road had been designed with a -2% camber.
He is a man well schooled in sport's one percent advantages - the so-called marginal gains. Why? As a data scientist Ketchell has helped Team Ineos (formerly Team Sky) win three Tours de France. For the next four hours until sunrise, he kept a one-man watch over this hump in the road - a pivotal piece in the complicated jigsaw of Kipchoge's 1:59 Challenge. Ketchell was desperate to check nobody was trespassing on a small roundabout that had been his second home for the past two weeks. He was so unsettled that he jumped out of bed and hotfooted it 3km across Vienna. But 3,500 miles away in Austria, American scientist Robby Ketchell was woken by a nightmare at 3am.
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