Momoka Muraoka was the only Japanese athlete in action in the finals on the sixth day of track and field competition at the Tokyo Paralympics. A quintuple medalist at the 2018 Pyeongchang Winter Paralympics including a gold in the women's sitting giant slalom, Muraoka made her summer Paralympic debut in the T54 100 m partly out of sense of staleness and frustration with para-skiing. Making it to the final, she placed 6th out of eight in 16.71, 0.38 behind bronze medalist Cheri Madsen of the U.S.A. Muraoka will have a quick turnaround to the 2022 Beijing Paralympics just over six months away.
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...

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