African athletes make history at London Marathon

It was a proud day for Africa yesterday with both Kenya's Sabastian Sawe and Ethiopia's Yomif Kejelcha becoming the first athletes to finish a marathon in competitive race conditions in under two hours.

Sawe won the London Marathon in 1:59:30 while runner-up Kejelcha finished in 1:59:41.

CapeTalk's John Maytham spoke to Sports Scientist Dr Russ Tucker about this historic achievement.

Tucker said he feels more confident in Sawe than many of the other athletes they've seen in recent years because he voluntarily undergoes performance enhancing drug tests.

"What he did last year, I think just before Berlin was take quite an innovative step where his sponsor Adidas actually paid the Athletics Integrity Unit an additional $50,000. That was the investment they made. And they said we want this guy's performance, whatever it is, to be as credible as possible so for this 50,000 test him. In that instance 25 times before Berlin.

"He didn't get the world record on that occasion but they apparently repeated that ahead of London. Now it wasn't 25 tests over two months before London it was spread out over the last four or five months. But I think when we express scepticism because of the lack of testing, it's only fair that we give credit when there is more testing."

Tucker added that because Sawe finished the race so fast an so strongly, he probably has more. "What will be interesting is if Sabastian Sawe does go to Berlin whether he can go even faster... I looked at the last 20 years of performances and on average London is about a minute slower than Berlin. So it suggests that if he has a similar day in Berlin we might be talking about another world record."

As for Kejelcha, remarkably he was making his marathon race debut.

"Pretty much every elite marathon runner gets better after their first one which makes sense. You learn the event. You improve. Your training develops and you do better in your second, third or fourth one. So to run 1:59:41 suggests that he will also have something more."

Another African athlete, Ugandan runner Jacob Kiplimo finished in third place with a time of 2:00:28.

All three men on the podium managed to smash the world record of 2:00:35 set in 2023 by the late Kenyan Kelvin Kiptum who died in a car accident the following year.

All eyes are now on the Berlin Marathon scheduled to take place on the 27^th of September.

To listen to the full discussion, click the audio player above.