We're back from a short summer break. A week and a half out from the first race of the season's four World Marathon Majors races, here's a look at Japanese athletes scheduled to run. Everything right now is about qualifying for the MGC Race, the official trials race for the 2028 Los Angeles Olympics to be held in the fall of 2027 in Nagoya. The JAAF makes no mistake about wanting to keep its top people racing domestically where it can get a share of revenue from the TV broadcast and race operations, so anyone who decides to race overseas has to do it in a WA platinum label race and hit either 2:06:30 or 2:23:30, regardless of place, course or weather if they want to make the trials. At the same time concessions are make for domestic races, like for example the late-August Hokkaido Marathon where up to 3 men and 3 women can qualify if they go 2:12:00 or 2:32:00. As a result, you get things like last year where amateur runner Yudai Fukuda made the trials by finishing 3rd Jap...
the world's window into elite japanese distance running, since 2007
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For those who haven't read the interviews on this website from December 2011, they are well worth putting aside an hour or two to digest - I am not aware of any similar insight/background available through other sources.
And additionally, there's a sizeable memorial article on ESPN (read the article, ignore the video) at
http://espn.go.com/espn/otl/story/_/id/7928880/why-kenya-olympic-marathon-champion-sammy-wanjiru-live-see-25-story-shocking-talent-sudden-wealth-bitter-intrigue
RIP Sammy Wanjiru. We'll probably never know what really happened, and we'll certainly never know just how good he could have become.
They say imitation is the sincerest form of flattery , right down to the Wikipedia attribution:
RIP Sammy