A life dedicated to running

Amanal Petros usually goes to Kenya’s high plains region to train for his competitions at an altitude of over 2,400 metres. Here he runs several kilometres across the plains every day. Train, rest, sleep: this is what his everyday life looks like for most of the year, when he isn’t busy winning medals. And he’s won many of those in recent years: in 2026 the German athlete won the European championship in Birmingham, and in the year before he became vice world champion in Tokyo, missing out on the title by only three hundredths of a second. Amanal Petros is also the German record holder for both the marathon and the half-marathon distance. He is the most successful German long-distance runner.

However, his path was far from an easy one. Amanal Petros was born in Assab, a port city in Eritrea, in 1995. When he was two years old, his mother fled from the war between Eritrea and Ethiopia and took Amanal and his sisters to the Tigray region of neighbouring Egypt. He grew up in the restless border region of the enemy countries. “It was never safe there,” he says, adding that they were always scared that they might not live to see another day. This was why he decided to leave the country and flee to Germany when he was 16.

Amanal Petros’ journey to Germany

His journey was a horrible experience. He saw women being raped and other refugees being arrested and beaten. But he made it and arrived in Germany in January 2012. He initially stayed in a refugee shelter in Bielefeld. “I was very lonely in my early days in Germany,” Amanal Petros recalls. The German language and culture felt foreign to him.

Playing sports eventually helped him to get settled in in Germany. He first joined a football team. However, Amanal and his trainer soon realised that running without a ball was a better fit for him. So he joined the athletics club TSVE Bielefeld. His great talent soon became obvious, and he won his first local five and ten kilometre races. However, being an athlete was not only about winning competitions for him. It was also an opportunity for meeting people and he gradually began to feel at home in Germany. He started to understand the German mentality and learned, for example, that greeting rituals among people who do not know each other very well do not tend to involve hugging and kissing, and that you are expected to arrive on time when you are meeting people. Amanal Petros learned the language and was granted German citizenship in 2015. 

How Amanal Petros joined the Bundeswehr

It was around this time that Amanal thought about how he might be able to earn a living in the future, and he did an internship with a physio therapist. He realised, however, that it was not possible to have a full-time job and continue his intense training as an aspiring professional runner. When Amanal asked his trainer for advice, he suggested the Federal Armed Forces (Bundeswehr), where promising athletes are able to focus on their training as so-called sports soldiers, without having to worry about making a living. However, the Bundeswehr offered just a few hundred of these places across Germany, and accepted only the most promising talents that were part of the Olympic training squads and other development teams. It was clear that Amanal Petros had to train even harder and be more successful. His ambitious and disciplined efforts paid off and he joined the Bundeswehr as a sports soldier in 2017.

As is usually the case for sports soldiers, Amanal performed an abbreviated version of the basic military training. He learned the basic skills required of soldiers, such as shooting, organising his locker and saluting. He then joined the sports promotion group and was able to focus on his training with therapeutic and medical support from the Bundeswehr. 

Things continued to go uphill for Amanal Petros after he had joined the Bundeswehr. In 2020 he set a new German marathon record in Valencia, in 2025 he won a silver medal at the world championship in Tokyo and beat his own German marathon record once again, running 42 kilometres in 2:04:03 hours. In 2026 he became European marathon champion in Birmingham on what he describes as “a really challenging route”. 

Amanal Petros thinks of his service as a sports soldier as a commitment to his new home country. “I love this country, is has offered me so much,” he says. When he takes part in competitions he sometimes even kisses the Federal Eagle on his jersey. He is still happy about the opportunity to be living a safe life in Germany. He believes that sport is all about freedom, democracy and friendship between nations. If it came to this, he would also be prepared to fight for this as a soldier.