The BMW Berlin Marathon has lost the athlete its 27 September edition was built around. Sabastian Sawe, the defending champion and world record holder, has withdrawn with injury, removing from the field the man who ran 1:59:30 in April to become the first athlete to break two hours in a marathon staged under standard competition conditions. Berlin has absorbed late withdrawals before, but rarely one that takes the headline storyline with it, and the race now looks materially different from the one that was marketed through the summer.
On paper the men's race passes to Gabriel Geay and Guye Adola. Geay, Tanzania's marathon record holder, is the fastest man entered at 2:03:00, a mark set when he finished second in Valencia in 2022 and one that still places him among the twenty quickest marathoners in history. He was also second in Boston in 2023, which matters in a race where the ability to respond to a move tends to decide things once the pace settles. Adola brings 2:03:46, run on his debut in Berlin in 2017, when he finished second, and at 35 he arrives with more experience of this course than almost anyone else in the field.
What the withdrawal really removes is the record conversation. Berlin exists in the popular imagination as the place where marathon records are set, and the presence of the man who holds the current one gave the race a target rather than merely a winner. Without Sawe, the men's contest becomes a straight competition between athletes whose personal bests are three years old or older, run in different conditions, on a course that rewards a committed group and punishes a tentative one. That is a perfectly good race. It is not the one the organisers had been promoting.
The women's field is unaffected and is arguably now the stronger half of the day. Tigst Assefa leads it as world record holder and has made no secret of the fact that she is in Berlin with a record attempt of her own in mind. Rosemary Wanjiru is entered alongside her, and Germany's Esther Pfeiffer provides the domestic interest that Berlin crowds reliably respond to. If the men's race has become a contest for the win, the women's has kept its headline number intact.
Around the elite races, the event itself is unchanged in scale: roughly 60,000 athletes from about 160 countries are expected on the streets on 27 September, which keeps Berlin among the largest marathons in the world regardless of who is on the start line at the front. The date also lands close to the availability window for adidas's Adizero Adios Pro 5, listed by World Athletics from 1 September and widely expected to make its racing debut in Berlin in the way the Adios Pro 4 did. The shoe will now do so without the athlete who would have carried it into the record books.