Eliud Kipchoge of Kenya takes the lead in this year’s Berlin Marathon, stopping the entire sports world in its tracks.
The excitement is increased by Kipchoge’s promise of a fast race as he goes for his fourth championship in the capital of Germany.
The 37-year-old has a chance to go down in history as the fifth person to ever smash their own world record, joining the likes of famous British athlete Jim Peters, Australian Derek Clayton, American-born Moroccan Khalid Khannouchi, and Ethiopian Haile Gebrselassie.
With the exception of Clayton, who improved upon his own world record three times, the most recent of which occurred at the 1954 Polytechnic Marathon in London in a time of two hours, 17 minutes, and 39 seconds.
When he triumphed in Berlin in 2008 in 2:03:59 and became the first person to complete a marathon in under two hours and forty minutes, Gebrselassie was the last to break his own record.
Only a year prior, Gebrselassie won on the same course in a time that set a new world record: 2:04:26.
Kipchoge, a two-time Olympic gold medalist, established the current world mark of 2:01:39 in Berlin four years ago. In 2019, he ran 1:59:40.2 at the INEOS 1:59 Challenge event in Vienna, but the time didn’t qualify as a record.
The last person to break their own record was Gebrselassie, who triumphed.
“Expect a perfect race. I have trained well as usual, every training day is a challenge,” said Kipchoge at a press conference in Berlin on Thursday as he failed to talk about the world record.
“A perfect race is a good race…I want to inspire people and if a course record comes out of this at the end, I will appreciate it.”
The Berlin course has produced eight world records.
Victory for Kipchoge, who took the titles in Berlin in 2015, 2017, and 2018, will see him equal Gebrselassie’s most number of wins in the Germany capital.
Kipchoge’s last race was at the Tokyo Marathon on March 6 this year where he chalked his fourth sub 2:03 time with a course record time of 2:02:40.
