Eliud Kipchoge’s NN Running Team, which mainly features star Kenyan, Dutch and Ethiopian athletes, maintained its assault on major global marathons with Kenenisa Bekele (2:01:41) winning last weekend’s Berlin Marathon just two seconds outside Kipchoge’s world record.
It was a double by the NN Running Team in the German capital as another member of the team, Ethiopia’s Ashete Bekere, won the women’s race in 2:20:14.
Bekele’s win came after Sifan Hassan, another member of the NN Running Team, won her first World Championship title, taking the 10,000m in Doha on Saturday night.
Kipchoge, world cross country and half marathon champion Geoffrey Kamworor alongside former Chicago Marathon men’s and women’s champions Abel Kirui and Florence Kiplagat are all part of the NN Running team headquartered in Nijmegen, the Netherlands.
The team is a brainchild of Dutch athlete and event management company, Global Sports Communication, and its director Jos Hermens, a former Dutch distance running champion.
It’s a partnership between Global Sports Communication, American sportswear giants Nike and the NN Group, a Dutch insurance and asset management concern.
Led by 1975 Dutch sportsman of the year and 10,000 metres national champion Hermens, Global Sports Communication boasts of having nurtured the careers of the world’s finest athletes.
Through guidance from some of the world’s best coaches, including Kenya’s Patrick Sang and Ethiopian-born Dutchman Getaneh Tessema, the GSC stable has groomed the likes of Ethiopia’s superstar trio of Haile Gebrselassie, Bekele and Almaz Ayana, along with Kenya’s marathon stars.
The concept of having runners compete as teams, as is in the case in motorsports, is an idea Kipchoge has embraced and praised before.
“We have to make this a running world and I would like to see teams competing in athletics, just as they do in Formula One,” he told me in a recent interview. many of the pacemakers for the
INEOS 1:59 Challenge will be drawn from the NN Running Team stable, although Hermens’ team have been liberal enough to include top athletes from other stables and teams.
Kipchoge also sees this mix of athletes and nationalities a good advertisement for athletics and a good way to make the sport more popular and global.
