Sawe’s 1:59:30 marathon record officially ratified as world record
President William Ruto with record breaking marathoner Sebastian Sawe in State House, Nairobi on April 30, 2026.
World Athletics confirms the Kenyan’s 1:59:30 in Tokyo among eight world records set in the first five months of 2026
By Martin Weche
World Athletics yesterday ratified John Sawe’s 1:59:30 marathon as an official world record, confirming the Kenyan as the first man in history to run a record-eligible marathon in under two hours.
Sawe made history on 26 April, shaving 65 seconds off the previous world record of 2:00:35 set by the late Kelvin Kiptum at the 2023 Chicago Marathon — a mark that had itself seemed almost untouchable. The ratification, announced alongside seven other senior world records and one world under-20 record set in the first five months of 2026, drew a line under weeks of anticipation within the athletics community and confirmed what many had witnessed in real time as one of the greatest individual performances in sporting history.
The race itself was a contest worthy of the record it produced. Sawe was pushed hard by Ethiopia’s Yomif Kejelcha and Uganda’s Jacob Kiplimo in what became one of the most competitive marathon fields ever assembled. The three men ran in close formation for much of the race before Sawe made his decisive move with one mile remaining, pulling clear to cross the line in 1:59:30. Kejelcha, refusing to yield, also broke the two-hour barrier with 1:59:41 — a time that would have been a world record on any other day. Kiplimo finished third in 2:00:28, himself one of only a handful of men in history to complete a marathon inside the landmark threshold.
The performance arrived laden with symbolism. Kiptum, whose record Sawe erased, died in a road accident in Kenya in February 2024 at the age of 24, just months after his own historic run in Chicago. His memory hung over yesterday’s ratification, a reminder that the pursuit of the sub-two-hour marathon has carried both triumph and tragedy.
World Athletics also ratified Ethiopia’s Tigst Assefa’s women-only marathon world record of 2:15:41, set at the London Marathon while defending her title on the course. Assefa lowered her own previous record of 2:15:50 by nine seconds after pulling away from Kenya’s Hellen Obiri and Joyciline Jepkosgei in the closing stages of a race that itself rewrote the history books. Obiri finished second in a personal best of 2:15:53, with Jepkosgei third in 2:15:55 — marking the first occasion on which three women have broken the 2:16 barrier in the same marathon race.
The London women’s field, in other words, produced a collective performance as statistically remarkable as Sawe’s individual effort in Tokyo. That both records were set within weeks of each other and ratified together underscores the extraordinary standard of long-distance running currently being set, with Kenyan and Ethiopian athletes at its centre.
Among the other records ratified by World Athletics was a further improvement to the pole vault world record by Sweden’s Mondo Duplantis, who cleared 6.31 metres at the Mondo Classic in Uppsala on 12 March — competing in the city of his birth at the meeting that bears his name. The clearance moved his own record on by a centimetre from the 6.30 metres he had set when winning his third consecutive world title in Tokyo on 15 September 2025. Duplantis, who has now broken the world pole vault record on multiple occasions, remains in a category entirely his own in the event.
For Kenya, the ratification of Sawe’s record is a moment of national pride that extends beyond athletics. The country has long been the dominant force in long-distance running, producing world and Olympic champions across generations. Sawe’s achievement — running where no man had run before in a record-eligible race — adds the most coveted chapter yet to that story.
The sub-two-hour barrier, once considered a physiological frontier as remote as the four-minute mile, has now been officially crossed. What follows will define whether Sawe’s mark proves as durable as Kiptum’s seemed, or whether the history of the marathon is now entering an era in which the unthinkable becomes, simply, the next target.
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