NewsUSAThe Ethiopian Tamirat Tola prevails in the marathon of the Oregon World Cup and Kenya is left without a medal

The Ethiopian Tamirat Tola prevails in the marathon of the Oregon World Cup and Kenya is left without a medal

Athletes get up early in Eugene for the first World Cup marathon on US soil. It’s a quarter past six in the morning when Frank Shorter, national myth of distance, fires the starting gun on Martin Luther King Jr. Avenue, next to Autzen Stadium, home of the Oregon Ducks, the American university football team . A mass of 54,000 seats for a city of only 176,000 inhabitants. And it is barely 8:20 when Tamirat Tola appears victorious at the finish line, 42 kilometers and 195 meters in the legs before breakfast time, 2h 5m 36s for the African, a new championship record.

In between, they have gone three times around a 14-kilometer circuit with some slides, very close to the campus of the University of Oregon, where most of them sleep, along the trails on which they have been training these days, asphalt surrounded by trees, pleasant residential areas and by the Willamette River, just the image of a calm and natural paradise that the organization has wanted to project to the world.

The temperature is perfect at the start, about 14 degrees, and there is no wind, but it is a championship, the time doesn’t matter, and the bullets are saved for later. The athletes pass the tenth kilometer in 30m 53s, compact group, 50 of the 61 athletes who have taken the start in just seven seconds. There is no Spaniard among them for the first time in the history of the World Cups, an anomaly in the test that has garnered the most gold: three (two Abel Anton and one Martin Fiz).

The coincidence this summer with the European Championships in Munich has pushed many continental teams to reserve themselves for that competition, where a priori it is easier to obtain a good result, with which only nine of the 61 runners are European (three Belgians, one German, a French, a British, a Swedish, a Dutch and a Dane)

The marathon giants Eliud Kipchoge (Kenya) and Kenenisa Bekele (Ethiopia) are not in Oregon, but the Kenya-Ethiopia rivalry does not disappear for that, with Geoffrey Kamworor as the candidate for the former and the world champion in Doha, Lelisa Desisa, commanding the second with Tola, who has the best record of the participants. The local hope, Galen Rupp, born in Portland and therefore originally from Oregon, who knows the area best, awaits any weakness to be a prophet in his land.

The half marathon passes without major setbacks beyond an isolated acceleration of Shumi Dechasa, from Bahrain. It is passed in 1h 03m 57s, with 33 runners still together, but with Desisa already dropping to the back of the pack. Bad signal at those rates. He was slow to break the race, but when he did it was like a gas leak. At kilometer 30, Tamirat Tola, 30 years old, bronze in the Rio 2016 Olympic marathon, silver in the London 2017 World Cup, decided that it was time to stand on the highest step in a great championship.

Tola accelerated and accelerated, lengthening his stride on the descents and propelled by an unattainable inertia, until he escaped in 33rd, turning a mediocre marathon into the fastest in the history of the world championships (exceeds the 2h 6m 54s of the Kenyan Abel Kirui in 2009) after running the last 12 kilometers at an average of 2m 50s, and turning the famous wall that marathoners talk about into a slide down which he fell to the finish line, completing a second half marathon much faster than the first, in 1h 1m 39s.

Behind, Rupp yielded, and the dispute for the medals was between the Kenyan Geoffrey Kamworor, the Canadian Cameron Levins, the Ethiopian Bosinet Geremew and the Belgian Bashir Abdi. Finally they were taken by these last two, second and third respectively. Ethiopia thus obtains its second consecutive double, and Geremew the second consecutive silver.

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Source: EL PAIS

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