Kenenisa Bekele Will Race the Valencia Half Marathon a Month After Pulling Out of Berlin

Kenenisa Bekele was three days from his return to the Berlin Marathon in September when organizers announced that he had hurt his left Achilles tendon in training and would not start. Marathon Handbook reported the withdrawal that Thursday, just a week after Berlin had added him to its field. Three weeks on, his name has turned up on the elite entry list for the Valencia Half Marathon, which organizers published on Friday. The three-time Olympic champion is set to start on Oct. 25 wearing bib 18, though the list gives no detail on the injury or on what he plans to run afterward.

It would be his first race of 2026, and his first since he started the New York City Marathon alongside Eliud Kipchoge last November and did not finish. Since placing 39th at the Paris Olympics, Bekele has also dropped out of the Valencia Marathon after 31K that December and withdrawn from London five days before the 2025 race. The spring before Paris he was still racing with the best in the world, finishing second in London in 2:04:15, the fastest marathon ever run by a man over 40, and he knows Valencia’s roads well after running 2:04:19 for fourth at its marathon in December 2023.

The 1:00:22 beside his name on the entry list comes from the Big Half in London in March 2020, when he beat Britain’s Chris Thompson by 45 seconds and set a course record. He did run 1:00:09 to win the Great North Run in 2013, but that point-to-point route is not eligible for records. The fastest half-marathon by a man over 40 is 59:53, run by Switzerland’s Tadesse Abraham in Copenhagen in 2022, so Bekele would need his first half-marathon personal best in six years to take it.

Rodrigue Kwizera Still Leads the Men’s Field

Rodrigue Kwizera, who now races for Spain, is still the fastest man entered, with the 58:16 he ran in Prague in March. He was already the headline when organizers named the first wave of elites last month, and he is targeting the European record, which Andreas Almgren lowered to 58:06 when he won the world title in Copenhagen in September. Jemal Yimer (58:33), Tadese Worku, fourth in Copenhagen, and the Kenyans Owen Korir (58:58) and Daniel Ebenyo (59:04) remain his closest rivals on paper.

The full list adds plenty of depth behind them. Kenya’s Moses Cheruiyot (1:00:00), Portugal’s Samuel Barata (59:40), France’s Emmanuel Roudolff (59:37) and Mohamed Ismail of Djibouti (59:45) are all new to the field, and Japan’s Tomoya Ogikubo is entered with exactly the same 1:00:22 as Bekele. Organizers have lined up two groups of pacemakers for the men.

Yalemzerf Yehualaw, with her 1:03:51 from this course in 2021, still has the fastest best among the women and is making her first start since having a baby. Kenya’s Sheila Chepkirui (1:06:01) has joined a field led by Ethiopians Tsigie Gebreselama and Ftaw Zerai, while Emily Venters, who won the U.S. 10K title in St. Paul this month, is the fastest American at 1:08:48. Allie Ostrander (1:10:11) is also entered. Germany’s Konstanze Klosterhalfen, one of the names in the September announcement, does not appear on the final list. The race starts at 8:25 a.m. local time.