Sawe crossed the finish line and the clock showed something no one had ever seen before.
1:59:30. That was the time with which 31-year-old Kenyan Sebastián Sawe became, on April 26, 2026, the first human being to run an official marathon in under two hours. He did it in London, in only his fourth marathon, surpassing the mark set by Kelvin Kiptum in Chicago in 2023 before dying in a traffic accident.
He grew up in Cheukta, a village in western Kenya, helping his father in the fields. His mother taught him to run when he was a child in primary school. Today he trains at altitude in Kapsabet, voluntarily undergoes more than twenty anti-doping tests per race to prove that his talent is clean, and has just shown the world that the human body still has boundaries to cross.