Jamaica’s women’s 4x100m and Botswana’s Letsile Tebogo men’s 100m world records set at last year’s World Under-20 Championships in Cali, Colombia, were ratified by World Athletics on Monday.
The world governing body also ratified Kenya’s Eliud Kipchoge’s 2:01:09 marathon world record.
The Jamaican quartet of Serena Cole, Tina Clayton, Kerrica Hill and Tia Clayton took the title in 42.59 seconds, shaving 0.35 off the previous record that the same team had achieved on August 22, 2021, at the previous World U20 Championships in Nairobi, Kenya.
Another Jamaican team with Brianna Lyston on third leg instead of Hill, had clocked a marginally quicker 42.58 seconds at the Carifta Games earlier in the year in Kingston, Jamaica, but it was not ratified as a record due to errors on the part of the Jamaican authorities.
Double Olympic champion Kipchoge won the Berlin Marathon last year, taking 30 seconds off the marathon world record he had set in the same city on September 16, 2018.
The 38-year-old went out hard, passing through 5km in 14:14 and 10km in 28:22 – not just comfortably inside world record pace, but also well inside a projected two-hour finish. He maintained that pace through halfway, which was reached in 59:50 – identical to his half-way split when he produced a sub-two-hour run in an unofficial orchestrated race in Vienna three years ago. His pace started to drop slightly from then on, but he was still comfortably inside world record pace.
Ethiopia’s Andamlak Belihu had been level with Kipchoge up until that point, but the Kenyan superstar then gradually pulled clear and was out on his own. He passed through 30km in 1:25:40, then reached 35km in 1:40:10. By the time he passed through 40km in 1:54:53, his lead had grown to more than four minutes.
Kipchoge went on to cross the line in 2:01:09, making this the eighth consecutive men’s marathon world record to be set in Berlin.
Meanwhile, Letsile Tebogo had broken the championship record in his heat with 10.00, then won his semi-final in 10.14 before going on to dominate the final in 9.91 (0.8m/s).
His winning time took 0.03 off the world U20 record he had set in Eugene on July 15 in the heats of the World Athletics Championships Oregon22.
