Samwel Mailu smashes course record in Vienna City Marathon

Kenya’s Samwel Mailu smashed the nine year-old course record of the Vienna City Marathon. When he stormed over the finish line at the Vienna Burgtheater in 2:05:08 Austria’s President Alexander Van der Bellen held the finishing tape. Despite warm conditions during the second half of the race the 30 year-old was 33 seconds quicker than the former course record holder Getu Feleke of Ethiopia who had clocked 2:05:41 back in 2014. Fellow Kenyans Bethwell Yegon and Titus Kimutai followed with 2:06:57 and 2:07:46 in second and third. 

There was a Kenyan double triumph in the women’s race: Magdalyne Masai took the race with 2:24:12 from Agnes Keino, who ran 2:24:25. Ethiopia’s Gadise Mulu was third with 2:24:50. Austria’s Julia Mayer broke the national record by the tiniest of margins: With 2:30:42 she finished eighth and improved the time by one second. 

Including events at shorter distances 39,871 athletes were registered for the 40th edition of the Vienna City Marathon, which is a World Athletics Elite Label Road Race. 9,218 of those were marathon runners. 

With temperatures climbing to around 20 Celsius in unexpectedly sunny conditions during the second half of the jubilee race the men’s leading group was running a consistently fast pace. After a 29:43 10k split time a group of eleven runners including three pacemakers reached half way in 62:43. The pace continued to be fast and the group then partly broke up between 26 and 28k in the Prater Park, where Eliud Kipchoge had broken the two hour barrier back in 2019. When the leaders reached 30k in 1:29:13 there were six runners still in contention and it was an all Kenyan affair: Bethwell Yegon, Samwel Mailu, Titus Kimutai, Joshua Kogo, Bernard Chepkwony and debutant Elvis Cheboi. The later two then lost contact soon while Mailu started to pull away. Between 32 and 33k he had a lead of around 10 metres over Kimutai and another 15 metres over Yegon. While these gaps grew considerably in the final five kilometers Yegon was able to overtake Kimutai for second place.

But there was no way of catching Samwel Mailu, who had run an unexpected marathon debut in Frankfurt last autumn. He was a pacemaker but then continued to run and finished second with 2:07:19. “The race in Frankfurt gave me a lot of motivation. For me today was a kind of another marathon debut. This was my biggest career win,“ said Samwel Mailu. 

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