As Berlin prepares to celebrate the 50^th running of its famous marathon, race director Mark Milde tells MAJORS how the race conceived by his father in 1974 has evolved into one of the best in the world

words: Danny Coyle

In September of 1974, a group of 276 runners from the Sports Club of Charlottenburg picked their way through the Grunewald Forest on the outskirts of Berlin.

A seven-year-old boy sat in the police car at the front of the race, as his father had instructed him to.

50 years later, the same boy will be out in front of the athletes on the back of a motorcycle, keeping an eye on the runners as he did all those years ago. His father will be watching on from the sidelines, no doubt filled with a sense of immense pride.

The BMW Berlin Marathon inhabits every fiber of Mark Milde, and it has done so since he sat in the family living room, licking stamps to attach to the envelopes containing press releases announcing the race.

“Hopefully I put them on the right way up,” he says.

The race, conceived by his father, Horst, all those years ago, arrives at a milestone on September 29 when it reaches its half century.

The aim is to welcome a record-breaking 50,000 runners across the finish line to mark the occasion. It will be a feat accomplished by a vast team of SCC staff and volunteers that dwarfs the small but committed band of volunteers who wrangled those early editions into existence.

“In the 70s there was not really anyone working full time,” says Mark. “There were only people doing it in their spare time, so a lot of it would be done at home, and we kids would help my dad, whatever we could do at the age of six or seven, licking the stamps and putting them on the envelopes.”

From office tasks, the young Mark graduated to helping at the race expo where he would hand out the runners’ bibs at the Intercontinental Hotel, where race week headquarters are today.

“I remember using same elevator we use today with my brother and my friend. We would ride up to the 14^th floor, and just before the top you would jump and you would fly a bit higher as it stopped. We had the pasta party in that hotel too.”  

The hotel now houses staff and athletes for race week, but the Expo has long since moved. It’s now at the former Templehof Airport, a sprawling site where echoes from Berlin’s past still resonate.

It’s where the likes of Kennedy and Luther King Jr landed during the Cold War to deliver their famous addresses and, more recently, was a temporary home to thousands of Syrian refugees.

It has been preserved exactly as it was; check-in desks, luggage carousels and all, with its vast airfields and runways open to the public to run, roller skate, kitesurf and more.

Berlin’s – and Germany’s – political history is a key feature of the marathon. The Berlin wall fell in 1989 and the official reunification of East and West Germany took place just a couple of weeks after the 1990 marathon. Fittingly, the women’s race that year was won by Germany’s Uta Pippig.

By then, Mark had continued to progress through the ranks of the race organization. Reunification opened up an opportunity to redesign the course, but even then, producing a quick 26.2 miles was a primary priority.

“We were starting with the Brandenburg Gate in the background, and we were running from Strasse des 17. Juni and through the gate after just three kilometers, then back to the old finish. So we were integrating some parts of East Berlin, but not fully, because at some stage it would go uphill, and we were already trying to have a fast course. That’s why we are not half and half east/west. We only have only six kilometers in the former east,” he explains.

The 1990 edition also saw volunteers from East Berlin integrated into the race staff for the first time.

“It was a big thing,” recalls Mark, “because a week or so before the official re-unification, we were running through the Brandenburg Gate and there were no borders.”

After a bumper year for numbers in that historic edition, growth returned to its more sedate trajectory. It received another boost with the 25^th race in 1998.

Towards the end of Germany’s first decade as a reunified nation, from stamp-licking to bib distribution and all jobs in between, Mark's move into organizing the elite fields was complete.

His focus was to identify the runners – and the extra, minor details of the race – to establish Berlin as the fastest place in the world to run a marathon.

“I didn’t have the background of being fast myself, I ran 2:50 for the marathon, but there was a passion for the sport,” he says.

“I enjoyed working on small details to make the records more possible, and there was always healthy competition with the other races. We were looking at the times Chicago had and what we had, and that inspired me to do more.”

Certain learnings from other races are still in use today in that quest for records, such as a drinks station strategy copied from the Rotterdam Marathon that deploys cyclists to follow their athlete and ensure they receive the right bottle.

Observers of Eliud Kipchoge’s records in Berlin will be familiar with the man known as Bottle Klaus and his manic celebrations every time he hopped off his bike and successfully handed the Kenyan his fluids.

“And we are the only race giving out drinks to the elite athletes at 13 rather than eight positions. These small details help us to be better than others in some areas,” he adds.

But the finest details in the world matter little if they are not matched with the finest runners. This is where Milde Jr has excelled.

After Christa Vahlensieck ran a world best in 1977, there was no impression on the record books in Berlin until 1998, when the floodgates opened with Ronaldo da Costa’s 2:06:05.

One year later, Mark took over the elite recruitment, heralding a further 11 world records across the men’s and women’s able-bodied division from then until 2023.

“The breakthrough was with (Naoko) Takahashi in 2001, that was when we established ourselves as the world record course,” he says.

The Japanese athlete had arrived in Berlin as the women’s Olympic champion from the previous summer and became the first woman to run sub 2:20 for the marathon in Berlin, taking the record from Tegla Laroupe, who had set it on the same streets two years earlier.

The women’s wheelchair world record also currently resides in Berlin after Catherine Debrunner smashed it in 2023 along with the next three athletes behind her.

That has been the story of the race since the dawn of the 21^st century, with the rise of the East African nations fueling a string of barrier-breaking moments.

Berlin’s record list is littered with the legends of the sport, from Paul Tergat and Haile Gebrselassie to Kipchoge. His 2:01:39 in 2018 was the first sub 2:02 marathon on a record-eligible course.

He followed it with 2:01:09 in 2022. In 2023 Tigst Assefa demolished the women’s mark with her 2:11:53, just two weeks before the men’s record crossed the Atlantic and back into Chicago’s possession thanks to the late Kelvin Kiptum’s astonishing 2:00:25.

Since 2004 Mark has had the title of Race Director after Horst handed the baton – literally in the photoshoot that accompanied the announcement – to his son.

Two years later he had a seat a the top table as the World Marathon Majors was born, joining London, Boston, Chicago and New York City to forge a new series that would reward the best in the world with series prize money.

“I think the name was produced at some bar, I was not there! My first reaction was ‘it works but it’s not that great!’

“At the time it was about the elites, offering big prize money and trying to establish the brand and to tie the elites more closely to us.

“We were successful in that, although it was complicated to understand. Now with the new era in shoe technology and better training and recovery, they can compete consistently.

“But we also saw in Berlin that more south Americans were coming, they would see us at the New York Expo, for example, and become interested. That shifted our attention to begin to think about the masses moving from one race to another.”

It was this shift that gave Mark the impetus to design the first draft of what would become the Six Star program, which began life with the working title of the 'WMM Fitness Runner'.

The original document even suggests 'Runners who have completed all WMM races in a period of two or three years will receive a special medal of honor'.

He was on to something, and as the idea developed, Berlin's team assumed the duties for sending out physical certificates to the finishers of all five races, and as the internet became more important, an online list was created.

Fast forward 10 years after the Majors were formed, with Tokyo then in the fold, the Six Star medal was created, and has become the most coveted piece of hardware in marathon running.

The series has become a quest for hundreds of thousands of runners aspiring to complete their own Six Star journey, as Abbott assumed the role of title sponsor, and even some of the greats of the sport have now pursued it as a goal.

Edna Kiplagat, Deena Kastor and Sara Hall have all earned theirs in Berlin, and in its 50th race, more than 150 new Six Star Finishers will be collecting their medal as the worldwide total creeps towards 17,500.

Back at the front end of the field, this will be the first race since 2014 that has featured neither Kipchoge nor Kenenisa Bekele, and with the race so close to the recent Olympic marathon, the best in the world are still recovering. Taking the men’s world record back may have to wait.

It all points to new names emerging on September 29, perhaps to write a new chapter in this famous old race’s history.

On its big birthday, in a city that knows a thing or two about reinvention, spearheaded by a man steeped in history but who is no stranger to breaking new ground, that all seems incredibly appropriate.