(The Turkish Post) – Kenya’s Eliud Kipchoge won the Melbourne Marathon on Sunday, Oct. 11, in a course record of 2 hours, 9 minutes and 10 seconds, his first marathon victory in three years.
The 41-year-old two-time Olympic champion broke away from the field in the last 10 kilometers and finished inside the Melbourne Cricket Ground, lowering the race record by two seconds. His team gave his time as 2:09:08.
Eliud Kipchoge pulls clear in the final stretch
Kipchoge ran the closing kilometers alone and slowed on the final half-lap inside the stadium to wave to the crowd, which cost him a few seconds.
Australia’s Thomas Do Canto finished second in 2:10:35, and his compatriot Reece Edwards was third.
“I believe that my body is still peaking,” Kipchoge said after the race.
The win was the 17th marathon victory of his career and his first since the Berlin Marathon in September 2023, which he won in 2:02:42 for a record fifth title in the German capital.
Melbourne Marathon women’s race
New Zealand’s Camille French won the women’s race in 2:28:25. Australia’s Sinead Diver was second in 2:28:49, and Nichola Sheridan of Ireland finished third in 2:29:13.
The Melbourne Cricket Ground, where both races ended, was the main stadium of the 1956 Summer Olympics and hosted the start and finish of the Olympic marathon that year.
A course record on a world tour
Melbourne was the third stop of a world tour in which Eliud Kipchoge aims to run a marathon on each of the seven continents, including Antarctica.
The tour began in South Africa, where Kipchoge finished 16th at the Cape Town Marathon on May 24 in 2:13:29, and continued with the Porto Alegre Marathon in Brazil, where he finished 12th. Melbourne gave him the first win of the tour.
Four stops remain, in Europe, North America, Asia and Antarctica. The race in Melbourne was Kipchoge’s second marathon in Australia, after he ran the Sydney Marathon in 2025, its first year as one of the World Marathon Majors.
A career at the top of distance running
Born in 1984 in Kenya’s Nandi County, in the Rift Valley highlands that have produced many of the country’s distance runners, Eliud Kipchoge won the Olympic marathon at the 2016 Games in Rio de Janeiro and again at the Tokyo Games, held in 2021. Before moving to the marathon, he was a leading track runner and won the 5,000 meters at the 2003 world championships in Paris at the age of 18.
On the roads, he won the London Marathon four times, in 2015, 2016, 2018 and 2019, as well as the Berlin, Chicago and Tokyo marathons. His five Berlin titles came in 2015, 2017, 2018, 2022 and 2023.
He set the marathon world record of 2:01:09 in Berlin in September 2022. Kenya’s Kelvin Kiptum lowered it to 2:00:35 in Chicago in October 2023, a few months before Kiptum died in a road accident in Kenya in February 2024.
In October 2019, Kipchoge became the first person to run the marathon distance in under two hours, clocking 1:59:40 at a specially organized event in Vienna. The time was not recognized as a world record because the race used rotating pacemakers and other aids not allowed under competition rules.
After his 2023 Berlin win, Kipchoge finished 10th at the Tokyo Marathon in March 2024, his worst result in a marathon at the time. Earlier, in April 2023, he had finished sixth at the Boston Marathon on his first attempt at the race.
At the Paris Olympics in August 2024, where he was seeking a record third straight Olympic marathon title, Kipchoge did not finish the race.
