Tigst Assefa to Have Surgery in Munich on Her Injured Achilles

Tigst Assefa was 10 seconds inside world record pace when she passed 40K at the Berlin Marathon on Sunday, and she still won in a course record 2:11:04 after her stride fell apart over the last two kilometers. We reported on her win and the limp that cost her the record shortly after she finished. Since then her manager has said the tendon is broken, and she will have surgery on it in Munich on Monday.

Her manager, Gianni Demadonna, told Kenya’s Pura Vida Sports Africa that “the right tendon is broken” and that she “will undergo surgery tomorrow (Monday) in Munich with full assistance from Adidas and with Dr. Johannes Gabel, one of the best surgeons in Germany.” Gabel is chief physician of foot and ankle surgery at the BG Unfallklinik Murnau, a trauma hospital south of Munich. Athletics Weekly has described the injury as a partial rupture of the tendon. She had been taken to hospital in Berlin straight after the race.

Assefa sat down just past the line and took her shoes off, and Haile Gebrselassie helped her out of the finish area. She was still with the race doctors when the podium ceremony took place, so she missed it, and she did not speak to reporters. Race director Mark Milde told AFP she was being treated in hospital and that something had gone wrong with a tendon, which he later specified as the right Achilles.

“We have to bow our heads to this performance. She was on a world record course for most of the race but then something happened to her tendon,” Milde said, in comments carried by AFP. “To finish like this, I’ve never seen something like this. The pain is hard to imagine.”

BMW’s race-day press release put her slowdown down to muscle problems, and Berlin’s Tagesspiegel reported a cramp, so for the first few hours after the finish even the nature of the injury was unclear. Milde then confirmed the Achilles to AFP and to the German agency SID.

Until then her race had gone almost exactly to plan: she reached 35K in 1:47:32, 14 seconds ahead of the schedule for Ruth Chepngetich’s 2:09:56 world record, and was at 40K in 2:03:00 with 6:55 in hand for the final 2.195K, a stretch that ended up taking her 8:04. Even so, the time took 49 seconds off the 2:11:53 she ran in Berlin in 2023, then a world record, and it is the third-fastest women’s marathon ever run. The €50,000 ($57,000) world record bonus went unclaimed. Ethiopian women filled the first five places in the full results, and Guye Adola won the men’s race in 2:02:50.

It was her third Berlin win, after 2022 and 2023, and her second marathon in five months. In April she won London in 2:15:41, a women-only world record, and Berlin was billed in advance as an official attempt on the world record.

Sifan Hassan pulled out of London in March with an Achilles injury she picked up on a treadmill, and Jakob Ingebrigtsen had surgery on a long-running Achilles problem in February, which makes Assefa the third of the sport’s best-known distance runners to be set back by the same tendon this year.

Demadonna told the same outlet that her recovery “will take long… maybe six months before we can see her in competition again,” which would keep Assefa from racing until next spring at the earliest.

Updated Sept. 27: This story has been updated with her manager’s confirmation via Pura Vida Sports Africa that Assefa will have surgery on the tendon in Munich on Monday.