It defies the mores of modern marathon running, but the sport's fate may lie in the hands of a rookie American, who trains in snowdrifts and went to a school lacking an athletics team. Ryan Hall aims to “move a million miles” and a metaphorical mountain as he plots a course to Beijing that has encompassed triumph and tragedy.

Big in Big Bear, California, he has no bugbear about the low profile he has elsewhere in the United States. Distance running is on the fringes in a country where the quick-fix rules, but Hall is the real deal. At 25, he will be competing in London on Sunday in only his third marathon, but Stefano Baldini, the Olympic champion, has cited him as “the future”.

It is 100 years since Johnny Hayes, a New Yorker, won the marathon at the London Olympic Games and 27 since Dick Beardsley became the first of only two American men to win the London Marathon. Hall is threatening the African hegemony, with the memory of Ryan Shay, his friend who collapsed and died at the Olympic trials in November last year, a motivating factor.