Sebastian Sawe’s rule over the running kingdom officially began on Sunday, marked by soaring past a two-hour barrier that once seemed out of reach but not impossible.
And as the buzz of seeing reports and posts of a singular time — 1:59:30 — persists, it can be agreed that the sport will now distinguish what came before and the day in London when everything changed.
Sawe’s time will undergo usual ratification formalities. But his feat gos beyond being a new benchmark in a year that has already shown that runners are picking when to create their moments rather than waiting for the stage to declare when the lights will shine.
For London Marathon organizers, said on Monday that a record 59,830 finisher completed Sunday’s race, Sawe’s time clocked on their watch will be difficult to top in the remaining four majors this year. And they can no set sights on locking Sawe in for the next frontier of the race. Last week London officials confirmed that they are exploring plans to transform next year’s race into a two-day event. It could mean fielding a record 100,000 participants and offers Sawe a chance to return for a possible third straight win on the course.
And if Sawe returns, the prospect of a brand family affair would be too good to pass up for Adidas in 2027 as the German sportswear maker cashed out of this London tour with the biggest bragging rights of the current marathon season.
Yomif Kejelcha battled alongside Sawe for the entirety of the race and finished second in an unreal 1:59:41 and became the second person to run under two hours — all in the same event.
And Tigst Assefa repeated on the course on Sunday, lowering her previous women’s-only world record to 2:15:41 and nine seconds off of last year’s winning time.
All three are Adidas athletes and the brand said after the race that each wore the company’s new Adizero Adios Pro Evo 3 model that weighs in just under 100 grams.
Images of Sawe holding the shoe with his record time scrawled on the midsole were beamed all over the running universe and competed with headlines of the mainstream news cycle — because it was the news.
“It reflects the hard work behind the scenes, the support of my team, and the role of innovation in helping me push beyond limits,” Sawe said. “I’m honored to be part of a new chapter for the sport.”
The moment is still being processed, but for Adidas, a coup over the hyper-competitive performance shoe industry shook the market in real time with three of the sport’s top talents pushing record even further out of reach.
Adidas announced the Pro Evo 3 last Thursday in line with London’s race and said its athletes would wear the model but did not specify which runners. But the company’s major ambitions for the shoe were clear with a “two digits on the scale” goal as details about the model were unveiled.
The Pro Evo 3 carries on the lineage of the line that was teased in September 2023 and labeled as the “future of racing. At its lightest.”
But the $500 price — which has remained for all three iterations — was impossible to ignore and was clearly part marketing for a limited use shoe that served as the brand’s halo product. The Pro Evo 3 worn by Sawe, Kejelcha and Assefa was launched a day before Sunday’s race in limited pairs and Adidas says a wider release will accompany the fall marathon season.
But the Pro Evo franchise was a major score for Adidas before Sawe’s sub-two hour effort, with the brand previously outfitting its athletes on the way to world records, key wins in six marathon majors and dozens of road race wins.
“We weren’t just trying to improve on what we’d done before, we wanted to see how far we could go,” Adidas running general manager Patrick Nava said. “We went through more than a dozen iterations, working closely with our athletes and testing everywhere from our labs in Herzogenaurach to high-altitude camps in Kenya and Ethiopia. At that level, every detail really matters – we were measuring things down to the nearest nanogram.”
The details paid dividends in a shoe Adidas said improves running economy by 1.6 percent over its predecessor and is jammed with the best materials and technology the company has at its disposal, The midsole is a generous slab of Lightstrike Pro Evo foam fitted to an a ultra-lightweight upper and a “carbon-integrated system” for stiffness that is purpose-built for one speed — and winning.
It’s no major revolution but carries the necessary adjustments to keep the Pro Evo line ahead of the pack without being simply relevant.
How Adidas moves in the weeks following the strides Sawe, Kejelcha and Assefa have taken will need to go beyond its congratulatory posts on social media and incoming performance bonuses. And its feasible that all three could run the Berlin Marathon in September — an Adidas-backed race — and rip through the fast course even with no pressure to attempt a record.
And how rival brands like Nike, Puma, On, Asics and others respond with products already in development for their elite runners will have to wait until the four fall majors and Valencia after a long summer of action on the track.
Adidas smartly put the perfect target on the feet of its athletes in London and came away with more than top podium spots as Sawe, Kejelcha and Assefa stuck to their routines, exceeded the planned times of their pacers and simply picked the right time to overachieve.
“It shows the work that happens every day, the strength of the team around me and how everything comes together to go beyond what we thought was possible, Assefa said. “I’m grateful to be part of this moment for the sport.”
And while the celebration of the Sawe’s record is a universal leap for running, it should be assumed that competing brands have quietly conceded, while others publicly recognized his achievement.
Nike heavily pioneered and pushed the effort that ushered in the supershoe era — one that brought innovation and fierce reactions from rivals. The company took a moral victory on Sunday and posted a message on social media acknowledging that a defining line had been crossed.
“The clock has been reset. There is no finish line,” the post read while Eliud Kipchoge, who had willingly been Nike’s shepherd for its distance efforts for years, praised Sawe and Kejelcha in his own message for conquering a course he won on four times.
“Breaking the sub-two-hour barrier in the marathon has long been a dream for runners everywhere and today, you’ve made that dream come true,” he said.
Kipchoge had long been the modern standard of testing whether a two hour marathon (and below) was even realistic. And the 1:59:40 from his 2019 exhibition in Vienna was evidence that sub-two was a matter of inevitability, when it would happen and who would gamble on themself to rattle history.
When Kelvin Kiptum inched even further with his 2:00:35 at the 2023 Chicago Marathon, the eyebrows of running raised collectively because closer meant imminent.
Just over two years later, that time not only arrived, but showed up armed with innovation. A new shoe battle line was drawn with London as its setting and dares any company to show its hand when Sydney, Berlin, Chicago or New York approaches over the next few months.
The supershoe era is far from new but puts even more scrutiny on how other brands reply to Adidas, if they even believe they can launch a counterresponse.
The technology is one the side of any brand that simply gets the right pieces in place among a talented new generation of athletes that did not wait for Kipchoge to fade before thing the next step.
Nike will logically be part of the fight, especially when Jacob Kiplimo finished third on Sunday in London in 2:00:28 and Degitu Azimeraw took fourth in the women’s field in 2:19:53. Both were wearing prototypes of the next iteration of the Alphyfly, the model that placed the shoe wars into a serious battlefield.
But other brands also fared well in London, as Hellen Obiri’s 2:15:53 second place finish came in a development shoe from On and Joyciline Jepkosgei was two second behind her in third in an Asics prototype. The work is being done on the road and in the lab.
Adidas showed its hand first and won majorly and by Tuesday, the limited quantities of the $500 Adios Pro Evo 3 were already sold out as a massive billboard in London’s Piccadilly Circus projected Sawe’s 1:59:30 reminded onlookers that history was made days earlier.
And at celebration with employees at the brand’s headquarters in Herzogenaurach, Germany on Tuesday, Adidas CEO Bjorn Gulden led a packed ceremony for Sawe, Kejelcha and Assefa, who brought their record-breaking shoes as symbolic proof that the joint effort paid off.
It also meant that they pushed their pieces several spaces ahead on the board as other brands, for now, can only watch and plot what comes next in an ongoing fight for what could land on our feet next.
