'I'm scared, but to race against Kipchoge is really special'

If there was ever a day when Alex Yee had second thoughts about his London Marathon experiment, it came not on some gruelling training run, but with Eddie Nketiah’s clinching goal in last month's FA Cup quarter-final for his beloved Crystal Palace.

- Malik Ouzia

“Honestly, that moment where I Googled the date of the semi-final was the worst,” he tells Standard Sport. “It came up with April 26 or 27 and I was like: ‘You have got to be kidding me?’ If it was the final, mate, there would have been a tough call!”

In the end, Palace have been booked for the earlier of those slots, meaning they meet Aston Villa at Wembley on Saturday evening, before the Olympic triathlon champion makes an intriguing marathon debut on the streets of his hometown on Sunday morning.

“I'm definitely scared,” he laughs. “Compared to my triathlon stuff, there’s a lot of unknowns going into it and that’s something I've been trying to embrace as much as possible. I keep saying to everyone that I go into the marathon like 40,000 other people, with that excitement and that anticipation that we've got 42.2km ahead of us.”

Ahead of those thousands of club and fun runners, Yee will line up alongside some of the all-time marathon greats — including the greatest in Eliud Kipchoge — in arguably the strongest field ever assembled in London.

“I'm looking forward to probably waving them all goodbye at the start!” he laughs, though he is determined to pick a few brains around the athletes’ hotel. “To be in the same race as [Kipchoge] is really special and a bit surreal.”

Yee has his own serious pedigree as a runner, most notably for having won the British 10,000m title on the track in 2018, and though it came as a surprise when he announced his marathon plan just before Christmas, it was by no means a spur-of-the-moment call.

“I've been asking my coach [Adam Elliott] every year if I could do it,” he explains. “It’s never worked out and always seemed a bit of a pipe dream.”