Bekele withdraws from Berlin Marathon a week after being added

Kenenisa Bekele is out of the Berlin Marathon. The race announced his withdrawal on Sunday, one week after it announced him as a late addition to the field, Jonathan Gault reports. Gault says Bekele has been forced to withdraw. No reason was given.

Jonathan Gault

@jgault13

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Just one week after being announced as a late edition to the Berlin Marathon field, Berlin announces that Kenenisa Bekele has been forced to withdraw from Sunday's race.

It is a short, flat end to the most interesting subplot of the week. Bekele is 44. He has not finished a marathon since the 2024 Olympics, and his name landing on a Berlin start list seven days out from the race was the kind of thing that makes people check the entry list twice. Gault's reaction to the news was one word.

What is actually new

When Berlin added Bekele last week, the appeal was obvious. Berlin is the course where he has run his fastest marathons in the past, and a late entry from a runner of that stature is rare. A week later that is gone, and the race loses its biggest curiosity a few days before the gun.

What it does not tell us is anything about what comes next. The announcement gives no reason, so injury, illness or something else are all guesses at this point. Nobody in the sources has said Bekele is done, and nobody has said he is hurt. All that is confirmed is that he will not be on the start line on Sunday.

The read

Treat the original announcement as the outlier rather than the withdrawal. A 44-year-old with no marathon finish in two years being added to a major field a week out was always going to be fragile, and it broke exactly where you would expect. If and when Bekele does line up again, that will be the news worth getting excited about.

Berlin still runs on Sunday, September 27, with the rest of the field intact.