Oliver Brown
One of many wonders of the London Marathon, perfectly defined by founder Chris Brasher as the “suburban Everest”, is the sight of people wrestling with the parameters of their potential.
Beyond the allure of the summit itself, there is that pitiless duel with the clock. Sub-five hours? Sub-four? Even for a rarefied breed, sub-three?
An entire industry of pacers and training programs exists to support amateur runners in breaking their desired barriers over 42.195 kilometres.
The one watershed to elude humanity was sub-two hours, until self-effacing Sabastian Sawe breezed straight through it in London’s spring sunshine, accelerating as he breasted the tape.
Nobody seemed quite prepared for a feat so seismic. When a predicted winning time of around two hours first flashed up on screen, Steve Cram explained it was a statistical quirk, calculated purely on the basis of the previous mile.
Except Sawe’s surge was only beginning, as he propelled his lithe frame down the Mall and shattered perhaps sport’s ultimate glass ceiling.
A discipline that traces its origins to ancient Greece has inched only recently towards such a giddying landmark. When Spyridon Louis dipped under three hours to win the inaugural modern Olympic marathon, in Athens in 1896, he was so conspicuously the class of the field that his nearest rival was seven minutes behind.
Even 130 years later, the notion of going under two felt as if it belonged to the realm of video games. On the only occasion it had ever happened, in 2019, Eliud Kipchoge had needed a rotating cast of pacemakers and a looped Vienna course with only eight feet (2.4 metres) of total elevation.
Sawe, true to the spirit of the loneliest event, has managed it without any such crutches or tweaks. Yes, you can credit his quantum leap to his feathery wisp of a super-shoe, but there is no footwear on earth capable of delivering this result without supreme speed endurance from the athlete wearing it.
To put it into context, the Kenyan’s average pace was a shade over 13mph (21km/h), a level that most gym treadmills do not even possess. Most casual runners would struggle to last 30 seconds at such a setting, never mind a couple of hours.
Sawe recorded negative splits, tearing through the second half of the marathon in 59 minutes. Maybe you could imagine running 100 metres in 17 seconds. But could you comprehend doing it 422 times in a row?
The greatest compliment that can be paid to Sawe – and, let us not forget, to Ethiopia’s Yomif Kejelcha, who ran an equally astonishing 1hr 59min 41sec in finishing second – is that his achievement bears comparison with Roger Bannister’s sub-four-minute mile, perhaps the ultimate reference point in the advance of human athleticism.
Bannister, of course, derived no advantage in 1954 from billion-dollar shoe brands plugging their latest ranges. He was a junior doctor pounding a cinder track in glorified leather plimsolls. But none of the fortunate few at Oxford’s Iffley Road were in any doubt as to what they had witnessed.
“The word ‘rapture’ appealed to me,” wrote eyewitness Roger Shakeshaft. “We experienced something we were not fully entitled to, but we were darned if anyone attempted to take it away from us. A fortuitous moment in British history, which can never be repeated.”
Sawe’s accomplishment deserves to be held in similar awe.
After all, it answers one of the fundamental questions of existence: what is the absolute limit of human performance? How, when there is nothing but your own body to sustain you, can you summon the physical resilience and mental fortitude to go where nobody has gone before?
The rarity of the challenge has exerted a fascination for decades. Australia’s Derek Clayton, whose 1969 record of 2hr, 8min and 33sec stood for 12 years, dismissed the idea out of hand, scoffing: “A two-hour marathon? 4:34 mile pace? Definitely not.”
But in 1991, a paper by medical student Michael Joyner posited that the fastest marathon for the ideal athlete in optimum conditions was 1:57.58. Ed Caesar’s 2015 book, Two Hours, argued that the world could “finally glimpse the mountain-top”.
His theory was that reaching it would require a “moonshot marathon”, a minutely engineered event where the only goal was the time, proved prescient, with Kipchoge announcing after his non-record 1hr 59min in Vienna: “No human is limited.”
Sawe’s stunning run has brought the quest to its glorious fulfilment. And as a rebuke to cynicism, he has made it his mission to counter Kenya’s chequered reputation on drugs, describing doping as a “cancer” and making himself available for 25 tests over a two-month period.
It felt apt that London, which has turned the marathon into a vast and stirring communion, had the honour of staging his blazing dash into history. On a day when all 59,000 runners were stretching their own personal boundaries, the most stubborn record in athletics, the mother of all sports, fell at last. In a jaded world, that alone was a fact worth cherishing.
The 10 greatest sporting performances of all time
As Sabastian Sawe rewrites the record books with the first sub-two-hour marathon, our thoughts inevitably turn to Roger Bannister’s four-minute mile. And from there to the other era-defining achievements of sporting history.
There can never be a definitive list in a world which features thousands of codified sports, many of which we barely hear about in this country. But if we try to focus on global sports, and on individual performances, there are a few names that many people would agree on: Bolt, Woods, Comaneci.
So here’s a – highly subjective – rundown of 10 astonishing performances that Sawe can now compete with. I’ve focused on statistical breakthroughs, as well as achievements that marked the athlete out as playing a different ball game – whether literally or otherwise – to their supposed peers.
10. Jayne Torvill and Christopher Dean
Free dance, 1984 Winter Olympics in Sarajevo
While we’re talking about numbers and scoring, Torvill and Dean deserve recognition for their Bolero routine in Sarajevo, and the perfect 6.0 they received for artistic impression. For all our jingoistic excitement about a first British gold in ice dancing, this performance really did resonate around the world. At that year’s BBC Sports Personality of the Year show, they became the first – and still the only – double-act to win the main award.
9. Jonah Lomu
New Zealand v England, 1995 World Cup semi-final in Cape Town
We’re a bit short on team sports in this list, and especially on football, as it’s more difficult to pick out individual performances in such a collective enterprise. But if we’re looking for athletes who transcended their surroundings, how about Jonah Lomu – that improbable collision of pace and power in one 19 stone (120kg) frame? His four tries against a hapless England in 1995 felt like watching a bunch of prep-school boys tackle a grown man.
8. Martina Navratilova
Ninth Wimbledon singles title, 1990
My submissions to this list have focused on athletes who redefined or reimagined their sport. Navratilova arguably did more to shape tennis in the late 20th century than anyone else. Her physicality and scientific preparation put an end to perceptions of “ladies’ tennis” as something ethereal. There was grit and muscle behind her push to a ninth Wimbledon title at the age of 33, which saw Zina Garrison dispatched for the loss of just five games. These days, we speak about women’s tennis.
7. Jim Laker
19 wickets at Old Trafford, 1956 Ashes
There have probably been tens of thousands of first-class cricket matches, and yet only one man has ever taken 19 wickets at that level. Jim Laker might have been working with a favourable pitch – opposing captain Bill O’Reilly called it “an absolute disgrace” – but he wasn’t the only spinner in the England team. During Australia’s two brief innings, poor old Tony Lock managed just one wicket at the other end.
6. Sabastian Sawe
1hr 59min 30sec, London Marathon 2026
A massive margin of 65 seconds redefined marathon running and broke the most sought-after barrier in world sport: the sub-two-hour marathon. For all that he was assisted by recent improvements in shoe science, Sawe has just put himself in a different category to every other long-distance runner on the planet.
5. Nadia Comaneci
Perfect “10” on the uneven bars: Montreal Olympics, 1976
The woman who seemed to have broken the scoreboard, Comaneci also revitalised an entire sport with her flawless qualifying routine on the uneven bars, which left the electronic display showing a series of 1.0s. Not content with that, she then went on to achieve six more perfect 10s during the same Olympics, shared equally between the beam and the bars.
4. Roger Bannister
3min 59.4sec for the mile, Iffley Road track, 1954
It was a mind-over-matter feat from a man who knew no boundaries. Bannister destroyed the idea that there was a theoretical limit on human performance, and so ushered us into a new age of scientific training. Sawe is his natural heir.
3. Muhammad Ali
Defeat of George Foreman in Zaire, 1974
Some of the greatest sporting images of the 20th century involved Ali leaning over his conquered foe. The most famous of these fights, though, was the one in Kinshasa. I’ll leave the experts to debate whether it was Ali’s greatest performance in technical terms, but it left us with at least two phrases that have entered the sporting lexicon: Rumble in the Jungle and rope-a-dope.
2. Usain Bolt
9.58 at 2009 World Championships in Berlin
In this most primal of disciplines, Bolt was the ultimate speed king – a man whose performances left spectators turning and looking at each other as if to say “How is that possible?” We could equally well choose his 19.19 in the 200m at that same championships, but then the 100m remains the blue riband event of any athletics meet.
1. Tiger Woods
Fifteen-shot margin of victory at Pebble Beach, 2000 US Open
Golf is notoriously the most chancey of sports, thanks partly to the way that unexpected rivals can suddenly emerge from the pack with a run of drained putts. So for Tiger Woods to routinely destroy an entire sport by such enormous margins, especially in his banner year of 2000, remains hard to compute. At Pebble Beach, he effectively gave the whole field a 14-shot handicap and still defeated them.
Telegraph, London
