My Amazing Runner Pick from the Olympic Marathon
Not Mutai. Not Keflezighi. Not Ryan Hall.
My amazing runner is Ram Singh Yadav from India – the only second person from India to have qualified for the Olympics in the Marathon. He finished 78th with a time of 2:30:19 (the winning time was 2:08:01, and his own PR was 2:16:59 at Mumbai Marathon where he qualified for the Olympics) but he finished the course where 20 runners did not finish, including Ryan Hall and Abdi Abdirahman.
He was asked to ‘prove his fitness’ by the Athletics Federation of India by requiring to run 10k in 30min 10sec, just 5 days before today’s race. Yes, it happens only in India.
The first person to qualify from India was Shivnath Singh who came in 11th at the Montreal Olympics in 1976 at 2:16:22. He also ran barefoot and apparently holds the record for the fastest barefoot marathon time at 2:12:00 (so says Wikipedia)
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