The amazing development of recent years seems set to continue in Sunday’s Commerzbank Frankfurt Marathon. With 19 men featuring personal bests of sub 2:10 and eight of them having run faster than 2:07:15 last year’s world-class course record from Gilbert Kirwa (Kenya/2:06:14) will be targeted. If weather conditions are fine the Commerzbank Frankfurt Marathon could well see its first sub 2:06 time. The event is an IAAF Gold Label Road Race.
Somehow it is an irony that so many runners feature such personal bests, since it is not that long ago that the race eagerly waited for the first sub 2:10 performance. It was not before 2003 and the introduction of Christoph Kopp as the elite athletes’ coordinator that such a time was finally achieved. But since then the men’s winner has always run sub 2:10. Such is the extraordinary development that if a winner should run a 2:08 in good conditions on Sunday it would go down as quite a disappointment. If you take the 15 fastest men’s times ever run in Frankfurt none of these is older than five years. And the average of the ten fastest times ever run has already come down to 2:07:39.6 hours.
While organisers had released names of the men’s elite field earlier the women runners have now been announced. In contrast to the men the women did not quite live up to expectations in the past few years. This is why a much stronger field has been signed for Sunday. The aim is to finally break the five year-old course record set by Russia’s Alevtina Biktimirova (2:25:12). Six runners have been entered with personal bests of sub 2:26. Among them are Ethiopians Dire Tune and Mare Dibaba. Tune has a personal best of 2:24:40 and was the winner of the Boston Marathon in 2008. Just recently she won the silver medal in the IAAF World Half Marathon Championships. Dibaba ran a great marathon debut in Rome, where she finished third with 2:25:38 in March this year. Earlier she had improved Tune’s national half marathon record to 67:13 minutes. Two Kenyans – defending champion Agnes Kiprop (PB: 2:26:22) and Caroline Kilel (2:25:24) – plus Hilda Kibet (Netherlands/2:30:33) could do very well as well.
Meanwhile European champion Zivile Balciunaite (Lithuania) had to withdraw due to illness and former world record holder and world champion Catherine Ndereba (Kenya) can not run because of a foot injury.
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