From Eritrean refugee to European marathon champion: Amanal Petros's unlikely triumph

Amanal Petros stood in Birmingham's Victoria Square with the German flag across his shoulders and a gold medal on his chest, having just run 42 kilometers faster than anyone had ever run it at a European Athletics Championships. The time was 2:09:11. It was August 2026, and the 31-year-old had finally claimed the major title that had eluded him eleven months earlier in Tokyo, when he finished second by three hundredths of a second—a photo finish so close that even the runner who beat him, Tanzania's Alphonce Simbu, could barely believe it.

The Birmingham race itself was a display of control. Around the 25-kilometer mark, on an incline, Petros accelerated and the lead pack simply could not follow. For the final two kilometers he ran alone, managing the course's eight laps and 120 turns with the confidence of someone who had spent months training at altitude in Kenya. Italian runner Pietro Riva finished seven seconds behind, but the margin did not capture how thoroughly Petros had dominated. "I had everything under control," he said afterward. "My goal was to wrap things up early. That worked out perfectly."

What made the victory more striking was how close he came to not racing at all. Petros arrived in Birmingham on Saturday—the day before the marathon—because of problems with his electronic travel authorization to the United Kingdom. The delays stretched across two days of back-and-forth bureaucracy. "It took a very, very long time; it was awful," he recounted. The German Athletics Association intervened to resolve the issues, but he had essentially prepared for a major championship while uncertain whether he would be allowed to compete in it.

When the race ended, Petros dedicated the gold medal to his mother. "She is my queen and my source of strength," he said. "Thinking of her gives me new energy and motivation." His mother lives in the Tigray region of Ethiopia, more than 5,000 kilometers away. They have not lived in the same country since Petros was 16 years old.

He was born in Assab, an Eritrean port city, in 1995. As a young child he fled with his family to escape the war between Eritrea and Ethiopia, settling in Tigray where he grew up with two younger sisters. From age five he worked in the fields and tended animals. At sixteen, he left alone for Germany, arriving in early 2012 and moving into asylum-seeker housing while his mother and sisters remained behind. In late 2021, during the conflict in Tigray, he lost contact with them for more than two months. "It's very hard," he told Deutsche Welle at the time. "Sometimes I sleep poorly and have bad dreams. But I try not to give up hope."

Running became the thing that kept him anchored. "If I were to give up my sport, I would have lost everything," he said. "I've already lost my family, and then I would have lost the last thing I have left." He discovered the sport almost by accident. Shortly after arriving in Germany, he played football, but a club official noticed his pace and connected him with a local athletics club. In June 2012, just months after landing in the country, he ran his first 10-kilometer race and won by two and a half minutes. Learning German was difficult; understanding German culture was harder. He was naturalized as a citizen in 2015, unusually fast for an immigrant at that time, and made his Olympic debut for Germany in the marathon at Tokyo 2021.

In the years that followed, he moved steadily toward the world's elite. In December 2025 he set a German marathon record of 2:04:03 in Valencia. In March 2026 he broke the German half-marathon record with 59:22 in Berlin. Then came Tokyo's World Championships, where he ran 2:09:48 and lost by the width of a photograph. "As a professional athlete, I simply have to accept that and look ahead," he said, though the silver medal was Germany's first World Championship medal in the men's marathon since 1983. He had hoped to send videos of the race to his mother and dreamed of bringing her to Germany someday to watch him compete.

Now, eleven months later, he had his major title. When asked how he would celebrate, Petros smiled. "A bit of red wine will get me back on my feet quickly," he said. And when pressed on what "a bit" meant: "Oh, you know, one, two, or three glasses."