The lead switched sides · Kiplimo vs Sawe · 2022 & 2024

World Athletics senior men’s half-marathon annual toplists, selected seasons 2022 and 2024. Jacob Kiplimo: 57:56 (Ras Al Khaimah, 19 February 2022) and 58:09 (Copenhagen, 15 September 2024). Sabastian Sawe: 58:58 (Manama, 23 December 2022) and 58:05 (Copenhagen, 15 September 2024). Seconds under one hour = 3,600 minus listed time in seconds: 124/62 in 2022, 111/115 in 2024; higher means faster. Different races in 2022: the 62-second difference is not a head-to-head finish gap. Copenhagen 2024 is a direct comparison; Sawe finished four seconds ahead. Sawe’s 58:02 Rome–Ostia 2022 time is excluded: the course was not record-eligible and the result is absent from the standard annual toplist used here. No 2023 observation, split or complete career history; movement is visual interpolation. Do not sum the values.

Data: attributed factual race marks, World Athletics annual toplists and official reporting. Athlete images: Sawe, Leonhard Lenz / crop UCInternational, Berlin Marathon 2025; Kiplimo, Limes Sorabicus, Belgrade 2024 cross-country; both CC0. Photos identify the athletes at other events, not the compared road races; Kiplimo image zoomed in the native chart. Background: Petewarrior, Brillia Running Stadium track / Wikimedia Commons / CC BY 4.0, cropped, scaled and faded; illustrative indoor 60 m track, not a road-race venue. Exact source and image links in source notes. No endorsement implied.