A man running the London Marathon sampled 25 wines at every mile.
Tom Gilbey, a wine connoisseur, blind-tasted wines to raise money for charity. According to the BBC, he ultimately collected £14,000 ($17,431) for a hospice facility, which took care of his mother during her last days. A TikTok video of Gilbey running the marathon alongside the tasting has since gone viral on his page, scoring 3.6 million views and counting.
The 52-year-old ran the marathon with two glasses tucked in his running belt, and every time he stopped to taste each wine, he had to name the vintage, grape, and producer.
"If they were good, I might swallow it, and if they were bad, they went on the road," he said. Of the 25 wines, he was right about seven, two-thirds correct about nine, one-third correct about five, and completely wrong about four.
Gilbey's son Freddie—who is his father’s marketing manager for his wine event experience business—arranged the wine tasting.
"[My son] somehow managed to stash quite a few of the good wines in at the beginning, which lulled me into a false sense of security,” Gilbey said. "There was a real trio of bad 'uns.”
Gilbey has only run one other marathon in 1996. For this year’s London Marathon, he didn’t train especially hard, except for one 10km run that included one wine tasting.
"There was no strategy for anything," he said.
