Five days have now passed since Sabastian Sawe broke the two-hour barrier at the London Marathon in 1:59:30, with Tigst Assefa lowering her own women-only world mark to 2:15:41 in the same race. Both performances are routinely described in the press as world records, but technically neither has been ratified yet. Under the World Athletics rules updated in 2024, every world record in the marathon enters a formal review window from the day the federation receives the official paperwork from the host event, and Saturday's window opened with London Marathon Events lodging its package on Wednesday afternoon. The process is opaque from the outside, but the broad shape of the next twelve weeks is reasonably predictable, and a Sawe-and-Assefa double sign-off is widely expected by mid-July.
The starting point is the course itself. London is one of the few marathon courses in the world that holds an AIMS-Aleron certificate of recent measurement and a permanent World Athletics gold-label classification, which means the underlying course measurement does not need to be redone. World Athletics will instead audit the deviation analysis between the certified race line and the actual GPS trace produced from the elite vehicle and lead bike on race day, a check that has been quietly mandatory since the 2023 Berlin reconciliation. London's measurement team will also be asked to confirm that no late-stage course adjustments — manhole reroutes, barrier rebuilds, the small chicane around the Tower Hill cone — were applied without follow-up remeasurement.
Doping verification is the longer leg of the timeline. Both Sawe and Assefa provided the standard post-race in-competition urine and blood samples on Sunday, and both were subject to extra out-of-competition tests during their pre-race build-up under World Athletics' marathon record protocol, which mandates at least three out-of-competition samples in the eight weeks before any record attempt. Sawe took the unusual additional step before London of agreeing to a voluntary twelve-month extra testing regime through the Athletics Integrity Unit; that programme will run alongside, not replace, the ratification check, and the AIU has confirmed it has the necessary samples on file. The standard ratification window allows up to ten weeks for any results management process arising from those samples, with a further fortnight for paperwork.
The technology checks have become more involved since the regulations on shoe construction tightened. Both Sawe's Adidas Adios Pro Evo 3 and Assefa's matching Adidas pair will be measured for stack height, plate count and rigidity at the World Athletics testing centre in Karlsruhe, and the federation will compare the race-day pair against the publicly available retail SKU. The race timing data, including the official chip splits at every 5km marker, will be cross-referenced against the broadcast broadcast graphic timing and the Olympic-Time-Service backup chronometer. Pacemaking and drafting are also checked: Sawe's run was paced through the 30km mark by an authorised lead group and the broadcast feed shows him separating in the final 10km without any external assistance, but the federation will still review the overhead drone and helicopter footage as a matter of course.
Assuming each of those threads closes cleanly, World Athletics is expected to bring the records to its monthly council meeting and confirm them in a single press release. The federation has told reporters informally that it is working towards a target of late June for Sawe's mark and the same window for Assefa's, with both records likely to be ratified together as a single London headline announcement. If a sample is flagged or a piece of paperwork is incomplete, the window can extend by another six to eight weeks; the most recent comparable case, Kelvin Kiptum's 2:00:35 in Chicago in 2023, was ratified roughly fifteen weeks after the race. For now, statisticians are flagging both marks as world bests rather than world records, and the Adidas marketing department is treading the same fine line.