Does the fact that there is a down hill in the boston marathon reduce the distance? and do they measure the grade of all the dowhill in all marathon courses to ensure they are equal. Its ridiculous and total nonsense. The guy run hard to win just like any other atheletes does. He deserves the record or elese, these idiots shouldn't call it a marathon!

I hail Mutai. US$150,000 to boot is something. But it is a generally accepted marathon principle that the world record will be broken only at Berlin. I can see Wanjiru doing it if he abandons London for Berlin and focuses

Think the reason given was the strong tailwind and not the gradient.

What arbitrary parameters to utilize to discount such a tremendous accomplishment. From what I learnt running in primary school, I can tell you first hand that you don’t want to run a marathon that has a large elevation drop – it is difficult climbing thousands of feet of elevation and then descending thousands more. What a silly rule! The IAAF should know better & I'm disappointed at their lack of intelligence in the matter. Mutai ran a preset course and some fat bag of crap who never ran a race in his life says it's not a world record!

Kind of like the grand slam in golf - you have to hold all the four majors won in the same year, not at the same time, as the Tiger learnt when he held the four at the same time, but won over two different seasons....