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Marathon World Cup Team Medals Eliminated From Moscow World Championships

http://www.nikkansports.com/sports/athletics/news/p-sp-tp0-20121017-1033638.html

translated and edited by Brett Larner

The Marathon World Cup international team medal competition held as part of the World Championships marathon has been eliminated from the 2013 Moscow World Championships, revealed Japanese federation officials at a press conference related to the Nov. 18 Yokohama International Women's Marathon.  Based on the combined times of the top three finishers from each country, Japan has a long record of winning World Cup medals, most recently a silver at the 2011 Daegu World Championships.  According to JAAF officials, the IAAF made the decision to terminate the World Cup in September.  For civil servant runner Yuki Kawauchi (25), whose stated goal was to contribute to a second-straight team medal in Moscow, the announcement is surely a great disappointment.

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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...