World Athletics Just Ratified A Wave Of Records. Kiplimo’s Wasn’t One Of Them

World Athletics has been busy ratifying records. Last week it confirmed a whole batch of them, headlined by Sabastian Sawe’s 1:59:30 in London, the first sub-two-hour marathon ever to count, and Tigst Assefa’s women-only mark from the same day, alongside a string of others. One name that everybody expected to see was nowhere on the list: Jacob Kiplimo. His half marathon world record from March is still, five months later, sitting in limbo. And if that feels familiar, it should.

The Run That Was Supposed To End The Saga

Back on March 8, Kiplimo ran 57:20 at the EDP Lisbon Half Marathon to reclaim the world record, ten seconds inside Yomif Kejelcha’s ratified 57:30. It was a statement run, and it came with a very deliberate backstory. Kiplimo had originally been slated to race in Barcelona again, before Uganda Athletics switched him to Lisbon. The reasoning was strategic, and pointed: Lisbon carries a World Athletics Label, meaning records set there run through full ratification under pre-approved conditions. It was, in other words, meant to be the clean, unimpeachable answer to a mess that had dogged him for a year.

At the time, the 57:20 was logged as “pending ratification.” Five months on, it is apparently still pending, and it has now been left out of a ratification announcement that cleared marks set weeks after his.

Why “Pending” Is A Loaded Word Here

The reason the delay unsettles people is that we have watched this movie before. In February 2025, Kiplimo ran a scarcely believable 56:42 in Barcelona, becoming the first man in history under 57 minutes and taking 48 seconds off the world record. Then came a wait that stretched on for almost a year, and at the end of it, World Athletics refused to ratify the run.

The reason was the lead car. Broadcast footage showed Kiplimo running much of the race around 10 to 15 metres behind the pace vehicle, and officials ruled that under Article 6.3.1 of the Technical Rules, drafting in the car’s slipstream amounted to illegal assistance, cutting his air resistance. The rules don’t set a minimum legal distance from a pace vehicle, but World Athletics decided the arrangement broke the spirit of the regulation. The 56:42 was struck from the record books, and the official mark reverted to Kejelcha.

Same Pattern, No Explanation

That is the shadow hanging over the 57:20. The Lisbon run was engineered specifically to avoid the Barcelona problem, on a properly labelled course, and there has been no public suggestion that anything went wrong with it. Yet the ratification has crawled, and now a big batch of records has been waved through without it. World Athletics has not said why the half marathon isn’t on the list, whether it is a simple processing backlog or something more.

It may well be nothing. Ratification can be slow, paperwork moves at its own pace, and an omission from one announcement does not mean a rejection is coming. But given that the last time Kiplimo’s half marathon world record took this long to process it ended in the mark being thrown out, “pending” is not a comfortable place for this one to sit. For a runner who has arguably been the best distance athlete on the planet for the past two years, Kiplimo has an oddly hard time getting the record books to simply agree with what everyone watched him do.