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Kelvin Kiptum
Born
The shortest great career in marathon history. Kiptum skipped the usual track apprenticeship, ran three marathons in 2022 and 2023 and won all three: Valencia, London, then Chicago in 2:00:35, a world record ratified days before he died in a road accident in February 2024, aged 24. His trademark was a savage second half that tore up conventional even pacing, and the question of what he might have done remains the sport's great unknown.
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Sifan Hassan
Born
Hassan arrived from the 1,500m and 10,000m with world titles, and her marathon debut in London in 2023 was chaotic: she stopped to stretch a sore hip mid-race and still won. At the Paris 2024 Olympics she took bronze in the 5,000m and 10,000m, then won the marathon days later, outsprinting Tigst Assefa on the hilly course. No one else has attempted that programme, which makes her the boldest racer on the list.
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Tigst Assefa
Assefa started as an 800m runner, which makes her marathon times even stranger. She took more than two minutes off the world record in Berlin in 2023 with 2:11:53, then won London in 2025 and again in 2026, lowering the women-only world record to 2:15:41. In championships she has twice finished second by a whisker, to Hassan in Paris and Jepchirchir in Tokyo, which neatly shows the gap between solo speed and sprint-finish racing.
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Sabastian Sawe
Born
Sawe has turned the sub-two-hour marathon from a staged experiment into a ratified result. A world half-marathon champion in 2023, he won Valencia on debut, then London and a hot Berlin in 2025. In London in April 2026 he ran 1:59:30 in open competition, 65 seconds inside Kiptum's mark, and World Athletics has ratified it. Unlike Kipchoge's Vienna run, this was a real race, with Yomif Kejelcha also under two hours behind him.
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Hellen Obiri
Born
Obiri won two world 5,000m titles and a world cross-country crown before moving to Boulder, Colorado, to build a marathon career under an American coach. The move paid off on courses that reward tactics over pace: she won Boston in 2023 and 2024, New York in 2023 and Olympic bronze in Paris. Her career shows how a track racer's speed turns into a weapon once the pacemakers are gone.
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