Olympics 2024 LIVE: Marathon updates as Eliud Kipchoge targets history and latest medals from Paris

The penultimate day of the Paris 2024 Olympic Games promises to be a jam-packed ride of blockbuster entertainment with 39 gold medals to be won starting with the men’s marathon at 7am.

Meanwhile, Team GB target medals in the final round of women’s golf, the 10m platform diving and on the athletics track with Max Burgin targeting 800m gold and Laura Muir and Georgia Bell eyeing up 1500m medals.

We’ve reached the first big hill – with a 15 per cent gradient for the runners to trackle. Eyob Faniel continues to stride out in front, with Eliud Kipchoge in the next that lies around 20 seconds behind.

This hill will start to split the group up.

We reach the 10km split in 30:59. Then, Italy’s Eyob Faniel makes a break for the front ahead of the first hilly section.

We’re rolling past the Eiffel Tower now as the marathon hits the Seine. The marathon is an advert for Paris in itself.

Team GB, by the way, have Emile Cairess, Mahamad Mahamad and Philip Sesemann involved this morning.

After two days and seven events, only seconds could separate them. Katarina Johnson-Thompson ran the 800m of her life – the only problem was she pushed the greatest heptathlete of all time into doing so as well. Nafi Thiam completed the unprecedented hat-trick of Olympic titles in the heptathlon, collapsing across the line after chasing Johnson-Thompson down at the last. Thiam won gold by 36 points, or around two seconds.

It’s a 15:40 split over the first 5km, with the runners declining the opportunity to attack the course when it’s flat. The hills are to come over the second half of the marathon.

Victor Kiplangat heads the front of the pack, looking on for about 2:10 pace overall. It’s a gold medal race, so winning is more important that times. That changes how the race is run.

Abdi Nageeye has a nightmare start and has to stop to pick a pebble out of his shoe within the first two kms.

The marathon course will snake through some iconic monuments in the city, first up: Palais Garnier, the opera house.

It’s a bright, still morning in Paris as we get underway in the men’s marathon!

There is once again a great sense of loss as the contenders line up at the start without the world record holder Kelvin Kiptum, who died in a car crash in February at the age of just 24.

He would have been a favourite to win gold today.

Dina Asher-Smith and Daryll Neita left with one last Olympics regret despite Team GB relay silver

As a lightning track was turned greasy by a sudden, dramatic downpour and the relay baton turned perilously slippy, Great Britain upgraded the bronze medal won three years ago in Tokyo and turned it into silver, their best result in the women’s 4x100m relay in 68 years. Up ahead, Sha’Carri Richardson roared to gold for the United States while shooting the most lingering of looks towards Neita as she crossed the line.

Usain Bolt is the only man to win the same running event three times at the Olympics, which he did in the 100m and 200m in 2008, 2012 and 2016.

Eliud Kipchoge could become the first man to win the Olympic marathon three times, after Abebe Bikila (1960-1964) and Waldemar Cierpinski (1976-1980).

Today’s course in Paris is unusually hilly, though, with 436m climb and 438m with a maximim gradient of 13.5%. so it’s not going to produce a world best.

Kipchoge’s competition is likely to come from Uganda’s Victor Kiplangat and Ethiopia’s Kenenisa Bekele.