At the age of 37, marathon star Eliud Kipchoge is still ahead of everyone: In perfect conditions, the Kenyan breaks his previous record and improves it by 30 seconds. The new world record is now 2:01:09 hours.
Marathon Olympic champion Eliud Kipchoge stormed to his next world record in Berlin. The 37-year-old Kenyan ran the 42.195 kilometers on Sunday in 2:01:09 hours. Kipchoge set the previous record in 2018 at the same place in 2:01:39 hours. At first it even looked as if he could be the first in an official race to undercut the two-hour mark.
Three years ago, the two-time Olympic champion in Vienna was the first person to stay under two hours over the classic distance. However, since this run was not open to the public and took place under laboratory conditions, the time of 1:59:40 hours is not considered a world record.
After some rain during the night, the external conditions at the start at 9.15 am were very favorable for a fast race with cloudy skies, mild temperatures and hardly any wind. Led by his pacemakers, Kipchoge set a world record from the start and was 40 seconds below the previous record after a third of the distance. Only the Ethiopian outsider Andamlak Belihu was able to follow, last year’s winner Guye Adola – also from Ethiopia – not.
The leading duo passed the half-marathon mark behind the pacemakers after an almost unbelievable 59:51 minutes. The last helper got out a little later, after a good 25 kilometers Kipchoge pulled away from Belihu and from then on only ran against the clock as a soloist. He couldn’t quite keep up the pace of the first half in front of hundreds of thousands of spectators along the route, but he still beat the previous world record by half a minute.
For Kipchoge it was the fourth success at the Berlin marathon, so he is now the record winner of the largest German city run together with the Ethiopian Haile Gebrselassie. Gebrselassie won there from 2006 to 2009 and also ran two world records. A total of around 45,000 runners had registered for the race through downtown Berlin.
The women’s race was won by Ethiopian Tigist Assefa with the third-best women’s time ever. The 28-year-old won in 2:15:37 hours. Only the Kenyan Brigid Kosgei, who set the world record to 2:14:04 hours in Chicago almost three years ago, and the British Paula Radcliffe were faster. She had set the previous record in London in 2003 in 2:15:25 hours.
