Skip to main content

Kiwi Wyatt Wins Fuji Mountain Race

http://www.sponichi.co.jp/sports/news/2012/07/28/kiji/K20120728003776590.html

translated and edited by Brett Larner

3676 runners took part in the two divisions of the 65th Fuji Mountain Race on July 27.  Making his Mt. Fuji debut, Jonathan Wyatt (39, New Zealand) won the summit course in a strong 2:33:59, with Mina Ogawa (37, Amino Vital AC) taking the women's race in 3:07:51 for her second-straight summit win.  Toru Koide (30, Salomon) and Maki Hagiwara (37) won the men's and women's Fifth Stage course wins in 1:25:42 and 1:45:17.

With a margin of 17 minutes over the runner-up, Wyatt's win was definitive.  A two-time Olympian for his native New Zealand with appearances in the 1996 Atlanta Olympic 5000 m and 2004 Athens Olympics marathon, Wyatt pulled clear into the lead after crossing into the purest mountain running section of the course after the Sixth Stage.  "My win today is one of the biggest honors in my long career," said a happy Wyatt.  "In New Zealand we are lucky to have a lot of good places to train."

Women's summit winner Ogawa was equally delighted with her title defense.  "I wanted to run under 3:10 no matter what," she said of her assertive performance in which she pushed the pace from the start and succeeded in meeting her sub-3:10 goal.  She was also well under her winning time from last year, 3:10:45.  A former corporate runner for the Hitachi team until 2000, Ogawa had plenty of credentials to make her the favorite.  "The Fuji Mountain Race is totally different from other races," she said with deep emotion.  "It just keeps going up and you can feel it getting harder and harder to advance to the next stage.  It has helped me to grow emotionally."

65th Fuji Mountain Race
Fujiyoshida, Yamanashi, 7/27/12
click here for complete results

Summit Course - Men
1. Jonathan Wyatt (New Zealand) - 2:33:59
2. Sota Ogawa - 2:50:58
3. Satoshi Kato - 2:52:36
4. Turati Silvano (Italy) - 2:55:05
5. Takahito Kondo - 2:55:14

Summit Course - Women
1. Mina Ogawa - 3:07:51
2. Yoshimi Hoshino - 3:25:14
3. Keiko Nagasaka - 3:30:42
4. Kayo Shibuya - 3:40:33
5. Tomoko Oba - 3:46:26

Fifth Stage Course - Men
1. Toru Koide - 1:25:42
2. Jun Kaise - 1:26:20
3. Yasutomo Takenaka - 1:27:45

Fifth Stage Course - Women
1. Maki Hagiwara - 1:45:17
2. Mitsuko Hirose - 1:46:23
3. Satoko Uehara - 1:53:24
Labels:

Comments

Anonymous said…
Turati Silvano is from SWITZERLAND!!!
January 13, 2015 at 9:14 PM
Anonymous said…
It does not matter.
July 21, 2023 at 1:36 PM
Post a Comment

Most-Read This Week

Heisei Mountaineering Stops Takigahara SDF Base From Scoring 10-Year Streak at Mount Fuji Ekiden

by Koichi Iwasa of DogsorCaravan On Aug. 2 the 51st Mount Fuji Ekiden took place, starting and finishing in Gotemba, Shizuoka and covering 11 stages up to the peak of Mount Fuji and back down. Teams of 6 runners tackle the tough course, each running handling one uphill and one downhill leg with the 6th runner reaching the peak before turning around to head back to the exchange zone where they started. The Heisei Mountaineering Club team took the overall win in 3:50:39, beating 9-time winner Takigahara SDF Base by 2:07 and stopping them from achieving a 10-year victory streak. The independent team division and SDF team division were separated in 2005, and this was the first time that the winning independent team outran the fastest SDF team to take the overall title. The roster that Heisei Mountaineering put together for this year's race raised eyebrows among everyone familiar with the Japanese trail running scene. Handling the 5th and 7th legs was Ruy Ueda , winner of the Fuji M...
Post a Comment
Read more

Komazawa University One Step Away From Perfect Season With Hakone Ekiden Day One Win

Already the course record-breaker at the Izumo Ekiden and National University Ekiden this season, 2021 Hakone Ekiden champion Komazawa University came one step away from its first-ever triple crown of single-season ekiden wins as it won a highly competitive 2023 Hakone Ekiden Day One over defending champ Aoyama Gakuin University and last year's 6th placer Chuo University . Things got off to an unexpected start when Select Team runner Hayate Nitta of non-qualifier Ikuei University decided to take his one and only Hakone shot and run it up to his ability on the 21.3 km 1st leg even though the rest of the field opted to jog. At one point Nitta had a lead of almost a minute and a half, but as beautiful as it would have been for him to pull it off, Meiji University 's Shunpei Tomita and Komazawa's Kensuke Tsubura still managed to run him down in the final kilometer. Tomita took the stage win in 1:02:44, 1:02:08 half marathon pace vs. his 1:02:10 PB despite the slow s...
4 comments
Read more

How it Happened

Ancient History I went to Wesleyan University, where the legend of four-time Boston Marathon champ and Wes alum Bill Rodgers hung heavy over the cross-country team. Inspired by Koichi Morishita and Young-Cho Hwang’s duel at the 1992 Barcelona Olympics I ran my first marathon in 1993, qualifying for Boston ’94 where Bill was kind enough to sign a star-struck 20-year-old me’s bib number at the expo. Three years later I moved to Japan for grad school, and through a long string of coincidences I came across a teenaged kid named Yuki Kawauchi down at my neighborhood track. I never imagined he’d become what he is, but right from the start there was just something different about him. After his 2:08:37 breakthrough at the 2011 Tokyo Marathon he called me up and asked me to help him get into races abroad. He’d finished 3rd on the brutal downhill Sixth Stage at the Hakone Ekiden, and given how he’d run the hills in the last 6 km at Tokyo ’11 I thought he’d do well at Boston or New York. “I...
54 comments
Read more