French President Emmanuel Macron Seen Running Through Nairobi With Eliud Kipchoge

French President Emmanuel Macron started his Monday in Kenya not at a podium but on the pavement, running through the streets of Nairobi alongside Eliud Kipchoge, the two-time Olympic marathon champion.

The 48-year-old president was seen jogging next to the Kenyan athlete ahead of the opening of the Africa Forward Summit, a two-day Franco-African gathering co-hosted by Kenya and France. Footage showed the pair chatting easily as they rounded a bend opposite the Bunyala Road roundabout, with a small group of runners keeping pace behind them.

Macron wore a navy blue track shirt with a thick white stripe across the sleeves, black shorts and blue running shoes. According to French outlet The Huffington Post, the tracksuit was made by a French brand. Kipchoge ran beside him in matching color gear, looking, as ever, like a man for whom running is the easiest thing in the world.

A Stop at the Schoolyard

Partway through the run, Macron and Kipchoge stopped at State House Primary School, where pupils ran out to greet them. Macron peeped through a classroom window and waved the children outside.

Asked by their teacher who the visitors were, the pupils answered without hesitation: “Kipchoge and Emmanuel.”

One child asked the French president his own name. “Emmanuel,” he replied.

Macron later summed up the encounter in one short line: “Made new friends today!”

A Running President Meets a Running Legend

Macron has built a reputation for fitting workouts into his international trips, and for being photographed doing them. In late December 2025 he trained with French YouTuber Tibo InShape and members of the French armed forces in Abu Dhabi. Monday’s outing fit the same pattern, this time pairing him with arguably the most recognisable distance runner alive.

Kipchoge, who won Olympic marathon gold in Rio in 2016 and again in Tokyo in 2021, has long been treated as a kind of global ambassador for the sport. Our look back at his remarkable career covers the medals, the records and the years of work behind them, and last November he added another line to the resume by becoming the fastest Six Star finisher in Abbott World Marathon Majors history.

In 2019 he became the first man to cover the marathon distance in under two hours, finishing the INEOS 1:59 Challenge in Vienna in 1:59:40. That run was not ratified as a world record because of the staggered pacemakers, the lead car and the controlled conditions. We laid out the full reasons in our explainer on why Kipchoge’s sub-2 in Vienna never officially counted.

That barrier has since been broken under race conditions. On April 27, at the London Marathon, Kenyan Sabastian Sawe ran 1:59:30 to set the official world record, with a second runner also dipping under two hours on the same day. The full story is in our report on Sawe’s 1:59:30 win in London, and you can see the wider context in the 2026 London Marathon results and our roundup of every world record set at the race.

The new record came up during Macron’s visit. According to Capital FM, President William Ruto walked Macron through State House and stopped at a framed photograph of Sawe from the London race to introduce his guest to the current record holder.

Running on the Sidelines of a Summit

The jog took place hours before the formal start of the Africa Forward Summit, which has drawn heads of state, ministers, investors and policymakers from across Africa and Europe to Nairobi. The agenda covers trade, infrastructure, climate, technology, education and reform of the global financial system, with Kenya and France already signing a series of bilateral agreements on transport, renewable energy, digital transformation, agriculture and education.

Kipchoge, who is also expected to attend the summit, has framed his presence there in terms of his sport’s economic potential.

“I am looking forward to very productive conversations around the sports business and how we can actually treat sports and make it more better (sic) in Africa,” he said.