M60-64 at Berlin: Rondole Runs Away With It

• Joël Rondole won the M60-64 group in 2:45:56 (6:20/mi), more than 15 minutes clear of second place — the dominant performance in a field of 1,534.
• Victor Garcia claimed second in 3:01:18, while Liam Cotter — who actually crossed the line faster at 2:55:54 — took third, a reminder that the final standings reflect more than just finish-line order.
• The gap from 1st to 20th spans nearly 35 minutes, illustrating just how wide the talent band runs across 1,534 sixty-something marathoners in Berlin.
• Positions 7 through 10 were compressed into a 16-second window (3:08:00–3:16:13), with Kanai, Lange, and Udagawa trading places right to the end.

Joël Rondole's 2:45:56 — a 6:20-per-mile clip for 26.2 miles at age 60 — was simply in a different league. His race unfolded with an early aggressive move: he was running in the 764th position among the men's field at the first checkpoint, then surged to 549th by the halfway mark before managing a slight fade in the back half. Even with that late drift, no one in the M60-64 group came close to threatening him. Fifteen minutes and twenty-two seconds separated him from Victor Garcia at the line — a margin that speaks for itself.

Garcia's 3:01:18 tells its own story of a strong second half. He was well back in the men's field early — past the 6,700 mark — but steadily reeled in runners across every segment, finishing 2,021st among the men by the end. That kind of sustained forward momentum over 26 miles is no accident. Liam Cotter, meanwhile, ran a more measured race at 2:55:54 (6:43/mi), though his placement behind Garcia in the M60-64 standings shows the timing system caught a difference the clocks don't fully display.

Olaf Kern and Janusz Wójcik rounded out the top five, both finishing strong — Kern's 940th-fastest split among men on the 40K-to-finish stretch helped him close in 3:04:37, while Wójcik (3:08:07) and Timo Toivari (3:06:38) traded positions through the final kilometers. With 1,534 finishers in the M60-64 group, Berlin 2025 delivered one of the deepest fields of sixty-year-old marathoners you'll find anywhere — and Rondole made it look almost easy.