Style Dot edition
The course
An Abbott World Marathon Major.
A single loop, and one of the flattest roads in the sport. The start is on Straße des 17. Juni in the Tiergarten, the Victory Column ahead, the Brandenburg Gate behind. The opening kilometres are wide and straight through Charlottenburg and Moabit, the kind of boulevard that lets a field settle into a rhythm and stay there. Around six kilometres the course returns to the Spree and the Reichstag, then runs east through Mitte to Alexanderplatz and the television tower. From there it turns south and the city changes: Friedrichshain, then Kreuzberg by way of Moritzplatz, Kottbusser Tor and Kottbusser Damm, then Hermannplatz in Neukölln. The long second half swings west and south through Schöneberg, Steglitz and Zehlendorf, quieter and more residential, before Wilmersdorf, the straight of the Kurfürstendamm, and the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church. The closing kilometres are the ones people remember. Potsdamer Platz, then Leipziger Straße, then the turn onto Unter den Linden with the Gate standing at the end of it. Through the Brandenburg Gate, and a few hundred metres more. Nothing about the course is difficult. That is precisely the pressure of it.
- Start
- Straße des 17. Juni, Tiergarten, between the Brandenburg Gate and the Kleiner Stern
- Finish
- Straße des 17. Juni, a few hundred metres beyond the Brandenburg Gate
- Shape
- loop
- Terrain
- Exceptionally flat — the flattest of the World Marathon Majors. Wide boulevards, smooth asphalt, few sharp turns, long straights.
- Victory Column (Siegessäule), early kilometres
- Reichstag and the Spree (~6–7km)
- Alexanderplatz and the television tower
- Moritzplatz, Kottbusser Damm and Hermannplatz, Kreuzberg / Neukölln
- Schöneberg, Steglitz and Zehlendorf (~28–33km)
- Kurfürstendamm (~33.5km)
- Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church (~35km)
- Potsdamer Platz and Leipziger Straße
- Unter den Linden and the Brandenburg Gate
