Sabastian Sawe ran 1:59:30 at the 2026 London Marathon on Sunday, breaking the world record by 65 seconds and becoming the first athlete to officially run under two hours over 26.2 miles. A day later, the 31-year-old Kenyan said he believes he can go faster still, perhaps as quick as 1:58.
Speaking to The Guardian’s Sean Ingle on Monday, Sawe confirmed plans to race again in the autumn, with Berlin in September the most likely destination. The German course is flatter than London and has produced more recent fast marks than any other major. Sawe has not finalised the venue, but the autumn return is set.
Asked whether 1:58, a target floated by his coach, Claudio Berardelli, was realistic, Sawe was unequivocal. “It’s only a matter of time,” he told The Guardian. “If you have good starting preparation for any race, then to achieve anything is possible.”
The race itself was tighter than the world record number suggests. Sawe spent most of the morning in lockstep with Ethiopia’s Yomif Kejelcha, and said he was so focused on the duel that he never looked at the clock. He told The Guardian he only realised what he was on track for in the closing stretch, when the time came into view and he pushed through the line.
Kejelcha, in Sawe’s telling, made the difference. He credited the Ethiopian for forcing the pace and said both runners were operating at their absolute limit when they crossed the line under two hours.
Sawe also spoke briefly about his start in the sport, telling the paper he had been running since primary school but had kept his studies as a priority. He said he had always believed he would one day be a champion.
The celebration afterwards was famously low-key. Sawe is teetotal and turned down a sponsor’s bottle of champagne at the finish line. “I didn’t drink anything to celebrate, just water,” he told The Guardian. Dinner was rice and a piece of chicken, in keeping with the unfussy fueling approach Marathon Handbook has covered before.
His legs were sore on Monday but his head was clear. Sawe had been booked on a Kenya Airways flight back to Nairobi that evening, then rerouted to Germany to visit the headquarters of his sponsor, Adidas, before heading home.
Sawe used the post-race attention to push on a topic that has dogged Kenyan distance running for years. He thanked Adidas for paying the Athletics Integrity Unit $50,000 a year to test him more often than the standard schedule requires, an arrangement he first put in place ahead of his Berlin Marathon win last year.
“Doping has become a cancer in my country,” he told The Guardian, framing the voluntary protocol as a deliberate effort by his team and management to remove doubt around individual results. He said he wanted other Kenyan athletes to follow his lead and show the world that fast times can also be clean times.
The race set its own off-the-track record. London Marathon organisers confirmed an all-time high for marathon finishers, with 59,830 runners completing the course. That figure beats the 59,226 who finished the New York City Marathon in November 2025.
Event director Hugh Brasher called Sunday a turning point for the sport. He told The Guardian the team had spent years assembling the conditions for a sub-two performance, and that what the athletes did on Sunday had “redefined the possible.”
Brasher also drew a personal line back to 1954, when his father, Chris Brasher, paced Sir Roger Bannister’s first sub-four-minute mile. “It’s just beautiful that 72 years on from Sir Roger Bannister and my dad pacemaking we had a day that makes me really proud of what the team have put together,” Brasher told the paper.
For Sawe, the celebration is already on hold. Training will resume. So will the drug tests. And in five months, in Berlin, he plans to chase a number that until Sunday looked even further out of reach than the one he just broke.
