Skip to main content

Rothlin Wins Tokyo Marathon in Swiss NR 2:07:23

by Brett Larner

Osaka World Championships bronze medalist Viktor Rothlin of Switzerland won the 2008 Tokyo Marathon in a Swiss national record of 2:07:23, aggressively frontrunning the later stages of the race to break apart the rest of the pack. Unknown individual entrant Arata Fujiwara of Team JR East Japan overcame severe leg cramps which almost forced him to stop in the last 6 km to run a massive PB of 2:08:40, finishing 2nd and putting his name on the shortlist for the Beijing Olympic team. Kenyan Olympian Julius Gitahi (Team Nissin Shokuhin) had a strong second marathon, running 2:08:57 to take 3rd place. His teammate Toshinari Suwa, the pre-race favorite to be top Japanese, conformed to his history and failed to take the top Japanese slot, settling for 4th in 2:09:16. Rounding out the top 5 was Helsinki World Championships marathoner Satoshi Irifune (Team Kanebo), who ran a PB of 2:09:40. All 5 runners broke last year's winning of time 2:09:45, set by Kenyan Daniel Njenga. Njenga had a disappointing run, finishing 13th in 2:14:11.

A complete list of top finishers is available here.
The IAAF's account of the race is here.

(c) 2008 Brett Larner
all rights reserved
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Most-Read This Week

Ageo City Half Marathon Preview and Streaming

This weekend's big race is the Ageo City Half Marathon , the next stop on the collegiate men's circuit. Most of the universities bound for the Jan. 2-3 Hakone Ekiden use Ageo to thin down the list of contenders for their final Hakone rosters, and with JRN's development program that sends the first two Japanese collegiate finishers in Ageo to the United Airlines NYC Half every year a lot of coaches put in some of their A-listers too. That gives Ageo legendary depth and fast front-end speed, with a 1:00:47 course record last year from Kenyan corporate leaguer Paul Kuira (JR Higashi Nihon) and the top 26 all clearing 63 minutes. Since a lot of programs just enter everybody on their rosters you never really know who on the entry list is actually going to show up, but if even a quarter of the people at the top end of this year's list run it'll be a great race, even if conditions are looking likely to be a bit warmer than ideal. Chuo Gakuin University 's Reishi Yoshi
Post a Comment
Read more

19-Yr-Old Munakata Breaks Miura's U20 NR to Win Ageo City Half Marathon

The Ageo City Half Marathon is always big, the main race that the coaches of Hakone Ekiden-bound university men's teams use for firming up their entry rosters for the big show. That makes what's basically an idyllic small town race into one of the world's great road races, with depth unmatched anywhere. One of the top-tier people on the start list at 1:02:07, Kodai Miyaoka (Hosei Univ.) took the race out fast, but the entire pack was keying off the fastest man in the race, Reishi Yoshida (Chuo Gakuin Univ.), 1:00:31. Yoshida reeled Miyaoka in before 5 km and kept things steady in the low-1:01 range, wearing down the lead group to around 10 including his CGU teammate Taisei Ichikawa , a quartet from Izumo and National University Ekiden runner-up Komazawa University , 2 runners from local Daito Bunka University , 2:07:54 marathoner Atsumi Ashiwa (Honda), and Australian Ed Goddard . Right after 15 km Komazawa went into action, Yudai Kiyama , Hibiki Murakami and Haru Tanin
Post a Comment
Read more

New Year Ekiden Field is Set

We're deep into championship ekiden season. Over the last two weekends the six regions making up the corporate leagues held their qualifying races for the Jan. 1 New Year Ekiden corporate men's national championships. The New Year Ekiden is one of the only national-level championship ekidens that doesn't give its podium finishers auto-qualifying spots for the next year, meaning every team has to run the regional races every November. It's not hard to see how that eats into the fall marathon season and how doing it the same way they do for all the other big ekidens, including the corporate women's national championships later this month, and having the top teams auto-qualify, would open up the fall schedule and improve Japan's performances in men's marathoning. But it is what it is right now. In place of an auto-qualifying spot for podium finishers, the national corporate federation redistributes the wealth of qualifying slots available in each region based
Post a Comment
Read more