Three adidas athletes have just rewritten the physics of marathon running, dragging the impossible into the realm of the timed.
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The 2026 London Marathon went down in history: Sawe and Kejelcha shattered the two-hour barrier.
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Sabastian Sawe crossed the line in 1:59:30, with Kejelcha right behind him — a performance even Noah Lyles took a moment to celebrate.
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The third-place finisher also had a stellar day, posting the new official world record of 2:00:25 in a Nike prototype.
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On the women’s side, Tigist Assefa obliterated the world record, stopping the clock at 2:15:41.
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The secret behind the adidas success lies in the Adizero Adios Pro 3, an ultralight shoe built around ENERGYRIM technology.
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These results usher in a new era, one where sports engineering and athlete merge into a single, blistering entity.
Sub 2
The two-hour marathon barrier has officially been broken by two adidas team athletes, Sabastian Sawe and Yomif Kejelcha, today at the 2026 London Marathon. Sawe finished in 1:59:30, while Kejelcha hit the tape in 1:59:41.
A performance that Noah Lyles, the world’s sprinting headliner, celebrated on Instagram, noting that this record will be etched into sports history for good.
But this Sunday wasn’t just about those two athletes rewriting the parameters of the discipline.
You could fairly call it a “performance-dense race,” because the third-place finisher, racing in a Nike prototype, set the new official world record at 2:00:25, slicing 10 seconds off the previous mark.
This isn’t a one-off. It’s the payoff of a long arc of performance-building grounded in millimeter-precise effort management. The ability to hold the body’s motor structure together under extreme physiological loads is what turned a theoretical projection into a real, recorded number.
A World Record on the Women’s Side, Too
While the world had its eyes locked on the sub-2 ceiling cracking, the women’s race delivered a historic result of its own. Tigist Assefa, another adidas team athlete, claimed the new marathon world record in 2:15:41, reinforcing the technical edge of the German house in this round of racing. The feat — partly overshadowed by the media noise around the men’s sub-2 — stands as a cornerstone of the world records updated today.
The Tool: adidas Adizero Adios Pro 3
adidas brought the technical hardware that makes results like these possible. The Adizero Adios Pro 3 — weighing in at just 97 grams — gave the athletes the biomechanical reliability they needed. The shoe is built on the LightStrike Pro EVO compound, engineered to maximize energy return and minimize energy loss through the push-off phase.
This model also leans on a completely new use of carbon: the Energy Rods of earlier versions (carbon-infused bars that mirrored the foot’s geometry) are gone, replaced by ENERGYRIM, a fork that runs only along the perimeter of the sole, leaving the ball of the foot in direct, uninterrupted contact with the compound.
Toward a New Performance Paradigm
The achievements of Sawe, Kejelcha, and Assefa shift the axis of international competition. The fall of the two-hour barrier and the new women’s world record point to one thing: the modern athlete, paired with the right technical gear and a science-backed training method, can now chase speeds that used to live entirely in theory.
With times like these, the marathon enters a new era — one where the clock reflects a full-circuit synergy between the human organism and sports engineering.