dsm-firmenich
Pro Elite 2026

The Name Changed on 1 January

On 1 January 2026 the NN Running Team became the dsm-firmenich Running Team. The announcement came four days later, on 5 January, and it named three things at once: dsm-firmenich as title partner, NN Group staying on in a new role as founding partner, and Huawei arriving as technology partner. The one line in that release that matters to anyone who collects kit was the one that changed nothing — “NIKE Remains Main Partner and Team Supplier”, unbroken since the team launched in April 2017.

dsm-firmenich is a Dutch-Swiss company formed by the merger of Royal DSM and Firmenich, completed on 9 May 2023, listed on Euronext Amsterdam as DSFIR, with double headquarters in Maastricht and Kaiseraugst and around 30,000 employees. It makes ingredients: perfumery and beauty, health and nutrition, taste and texture. Chief executive Dimitri de Vreeze framed the deal on the company's road cycling experience — “Building on our experience in professional cycling, we will support the team through our innovations and science”. How long the deal runs has not been published: no term, no figure, in either the team release or the corporate one. We are not going to guess at one.

The changeover was staged across a fortnight of December. The team posted a farewell video to INEOS on 23 December 2025 and a farewell to NN on 30 December, after a teaser on 17 December that promised new sponsors on 5 January. New colours were on the start line at the first race weekend of the year, 10–11 January, and the competition kit itself was presented in a video on 9 April 2026. The team enters its tenth year: launched in April 2017 by Global Sports Communication, the Nijmegen agency the former Olympian Jos Hermens founded in 1985.

Seven Wins, Two Course Records, No Major

Counted honestly, to 8 September 2026 the season reads: seven wins, two course records, and no Abbott World Marathon Major. The first victory in the new kit came on 11 January, when Haymanot Alew won the Egmond Half Marathon in 1:03:10 by two seconds; the same weekend Nienke Brinkman was third there in 1:11:29 on her return from injury, and the 19-year-old Khairi Bejiga ran 26:52 for second at the 10K Valencia in only his second race over the distance.

February belonged to the half marathon. Joshua Cheptegei won the Burj2Burj in Dubai in 59:26 on 8 February; the same day Geoffrey Kamworor won the Ras Al Khaimah Half in 58:14. In March the team took two marathons that were not Majors — Haven Hailu won Seoul in a personal best 2:19:09 on 15 March, with Enock Kinyamal sixth in 2:04:46, also a personal best — and later added Lanzhou, Hailu again, in 2:29:54.

Rotterdam, on 12 April, was the best day of the year. Mekides Shimeles, 20 years old, won the women's race in 2:18:56: a personal best, and a course record two seconds inside the mark Tiki Gelana had held there since 2012. Aminet Ahmed made it a one-two in 2:21:25, with Alew fifth in 2:05:19 and Erick Sang sixth in 2:05:34. Six weeks later, on 24 May, Mohamed Esa won the Sanlam Cape Town Marathon in 2:04:55 — a course record by more than three minutes, and the fastest marathon ever run on African soil.

The Majors went the other way. Daniel Mateiko was fourth in Tokyo on 1 March in 2:03:44, taking forty seconds off his best; Shimeles did not finish. Esa did not finish Boston on 20 April. In London on 26 April, Kamworor was eighth in 2:05:38, Degitu Azimeraw fourth in 2:19:13 and Cheptegei twelfth in 2:06:39 — and the race was won, in front of them, by Sabastian Sawe in 1:59:30, the first ratified marathon under two hours, run for adidas. In Sydney on 30 August, Hailu was fourth in 2:22:57 and Kinyamal eleventh in 2:08:02 on his Major debut. Eight years after the team put Eliud Kipchoge behind pacers in Monza and then in Vienna to chase two hours, the barrier fell in a real race, to somebody else.

Kipchoge's own 2026 is a different kind of project. After completing the six Majors in New York in November 2025, seventeenth in 2:14:36 at 40, he announced seven marathons on seven continents — Antarctica included — as a platform for his foundation, and has called it a transition rather than a retirement. The first leg was Cape Town on 24 May, where he was sixteenth in 2:13:29; the second was Porto Alegre on 12 July, twelfth in 2:18:42. He no longer holds the world record, and the team no longer sells him as its record holder.

Browse the current dsm-firmenich collection →

Five of the Eight Records Still Stand

The team's own about page claims eight world records, more than twenty Major victories and over 250 road wins. Of those eight records, five were still standing in September 2026 — and none of the five is newer than 2021. Cheptegei still holds both of the long track records he set in 2020: 12:35.36 for 5000 m and 26:11.00 for 10,000 m, the latter run in Valencia on 7 October. Letesenbet Gidey still holds the women's half marathon record, 1:02:52 in Valencia on 24 October 2021, the first woman under 63 minutes. Genzebe Dibaba still holds two indoor records from the decade before — 4:13.31 for the mile in 2016 and 8:16.60 for 3000 m in 2014.

The three that went are the ones that framed the team. Kipchoge's marathon record, 2:01:09 in Berlin in 2022, passed to Kelvin Kiptum in 2023 and then to Sawe. Gidey's two track records both fell to a new generation: her 5000 m to Faith Kipyegon in June 2023, her 10,000 m to Beatrice Chebet on 25 May 2024. The men's half marathon record that once belonged to the team — Kamworor's 58:01 in Copenhagen in 2019 — now sits with Jacob Kiplimo at 57:20, run in Lisbon on 8 March 2026 and only ratified on 4 September, 179 days later. Kiplimo does not run for this team, and we are not going to file his record under it.

Two of the names above need saying plainly. Gidey has not raced a verified race since 2023 and gave birth in 2025: her record stands, she does not currently. Dibaba does race — she was entered for the Berlin Marathon at the end of September 2026, her fourth attempt at the distance and still looking for a first win in it. Her coach Jama Aden was arrested in a 2016 raid near Barcelona and acquitted of all doping charges by a Spanish court in 2023; the 28 athletes tested at that hotel all came back negative, and Dibaba has never been charged or sanctioned. The country stories behind these athletes are in our Kenya history; what belongs here is the kit they wear to work.

The Kit of the Cycle

There is no press release describing the 2026 race kit. The team said it was racing in new colours on 10–11 January and unveiled the competition kit in a video on 9 April with one line — “Inspired by where we come from, designed for where we're going” — and no design copy at all. So the description below comes from the labels of the pieces we hold, which is the only primary source there is. The distance singlet is listed Team Orange / Orange / Burgundy / White / Black: orange carried over from the NN decade, burgundy new, and both of them company colours rather than federation ones. It is 100% polyester, Dri-FIT, crew neck, marked Pro Elite Edition. The training layer splits in two: a black and white run (short-sleeve shirts for men and women, half-zip jersey, hooded jacket) and a blue and white run (short and long sleeve), with the cap in white, orange and black. That blue matches the training line the team put in its own shop in April 2026. The 2026 pieces are the first that can be dated by name rather than by cut — before this January, everything the team wore said NN.

Construction follows the athlete-issue rules our authentication guide covers: competition-weight cloth, race cuts, no retail run. “Pro Elite” is the athlete-channel label collectors use for kit the brand keeps off the shelves — and what a distance singlet has to do is set out in our anatomy of the distance singlet. A club kit is a different document from a federation one: nobody wore this at a World Championships, because at a World Championships these athletes wear Kenya, Ethiopia, Uganda or the Netherlands.

The 2026 Collection

Publicly listed pieces from the 2026 cycle, with in-stock items first and sold pieces kept as part of the archive. Check each listing for sizes and current availability. The team story before the rename is in the NN Running Team pillar, and the last full season under the old name in NN Running Pro Elite Team 2024.