AMSTERDAM — On a windless morning with the temperature at 9 degrees Celsius, Gideon Kiplimo Cheruiyot of Kenya ran 2 hours 2 minutes 48 seconds to win the Amsterdam Marathon on Sunday, breaking a course record that had stood for five years and recording the fastest time by anyone in the world this year.
Mr. Cheruiyot, 24, who ran his first marathon in Seville in February in 2:05:11, went through halfway in 1:01:40 behind three pacemakers, then broke his last rival, Tadesse Belayneh of Ethiopia, with a 2:51 kilometer along the Amstel at the 33-kilometer mark. He ran the final 7 kilometers alone, waved to the crowd on the Stadionweg, and entered the Olympic Stadium with 44 seconds in hand.
“I was not thinking about the record. I was thinking about the river, because my coach said after the river it is finished,” Mr. Cheruiyot said through a translator, a Kenyan flag over his shoulders. “When I saw the clock in the stadium I thought it was wrong.”
The women’s race was won by Almaz Tesfaye of Ethiopia in 2:17:33, also a course record, after a duel with the Dutch runner Fenna de Groot, who finished second in 2:18:50, a national record and the first time a Dutch woman has run under 2:19. Ms. de Groot, 29, a former 10,000-meter specialist who switched to the roads in 2024, was carried on a lap of the stadium by her training group afterward.
“I grew up 10 kilometers from here. I have watched this race since I was a child from the bridge at Ouderkerk,” Ms. de Groot said. “To run 2:18 at home, I do not have the words in Dutch or English.”
The times extend a pattern that has reshaped the distance over the past decade: carbon-plated shoes, better pacing technology and a deeper pool of East African talent have brought 2:03 within reach for runners who, 15 years ago, would have been considered good club athletes. Four men have now run under 2:03 in 2026, compared with one in all of 2016. Amsterdam, with its flat course and reliably cool October weather, has become one of the fastest in Europe.
Race organizers reported 19,400 finishers in the full marathon, a record, and said that 53 percent of entrants came from outside the Netherlands. The race director, Pieter van der Zwaag, said the field would be capped at 20,000 next year. “We could sell 30,000,” he said. “But the course cannot hold it, and we would rather be fast than big.”
Mr. Cheruiyot’s manager said he had turned down offers from three spring races and would decide on his next marathon in December. The runner himself had a simpler plan. “Now I go home,” he said. “My mother has not seen me since June.”
A version of this article appears in print on Oct. 12, 2026, Section D, Page 9 of the European edition with the headline: A Course Record Falls in Amsterdam as a 24-Year-Old Kenyan Runs 2:02:48.
