Championship Ekiden Qualification Weekend

Championship ekiden season is on the way, and this weekend two of the main events will hold their official qualification races.

Saturday in Tokyo's western suburb of Tachikawa is the Hakone Ekiden Yosenkai half marathon, a chance for collegiate men to be on the starting line of the world's #1 race this coming January. 10 universities are already qualified for the Hakone Ekiden by having finished in the top 10 at this year's race, and at the Yosenkai another 10 will join them. 41 universities from the greater Tokyo area will run from 10 to 12 men each and are scored on the total time of their first 10 finishers. The fastest 10 teams go on to Hakone, pure and simple. Top individuals from teams that don't qualify will also be named to a select team, as long as they're Japanese citizens, to fill out Hakone's field of 21. NTV will broadcast the race and its tense qualifier announcement ceremony live starting at 9:25 a.m. Saturday local time, with official streaming on TVer for those in-country.

Meiji University is ranked at the top of the field, a Hakone regular knocked out of the seeded top 10 this year by last year's Yosenkai winner Juntendo University. 2020 Yosenkai runner-up Chuo University is Meiji's toughest competition for the team win, but what really matters is just making the top 10. Kanagawa University, Nittai University, Takushoku University and Josai University look pretty secure to pull that off, but beyond that it gets interesting. Hosei University and Kokushikan University are in the grey zone of Hakone regulars vulnerable to programs trying to get back into elite status like Yamanashi Gakuin University and Senshu University, ones perpetually on the cusp like Tsukuba University and Reitaku University, and up-and-coming programs like Surugadai University and Keio University. Chuo Gakuin University throws an additional variable at the equation, a perpetual Hakone qualifier that somehow blew last year's Yosenkai and didn't make the cut.

Sunday in rural Fukuoka is the Princess Ekiden, the qualifying race for November's corporate women's national championship Queens Ekiden. 31 teams will race 42.195 km in 6 stages in pursuit of a place in the top 20. The ones that make it will join the top 8 from last year's Queens Ekiden at next month's national championship. TBS has the live broadcast starting at 11:50 a.m. Sunday local time, with multi-channel streaming on Youtube. JRN will cover the race live on @JRNLive.

Daihatsu leads the field, missing 8th place at Queens last year by just 9 seconds. Edion, Tenmaya and Shiseido were all just seconds behind, making it a close race up front. But like at the Yosenkai, this is a qualifying race and what matters most is getting into the qualifying bracket. Down around the 15th to 25th-ranked level you've got a mix of traditionally minor teams like Nitori, Shimamura and Toto, fallen greats like former national champ Daiichi Seimei, and new teams like SID Group. At the collegiate level making nationals can impact a coach's career, but at the corporate level it can make the difference to a team's existence the next season. Amid a post-Olympic pullback and the ongoing economic impact of the pandemic, this year that's truer than ever.

Waseda Leads Top 7 Teams Under Izumo Ekiden CR, Ivy League Best-Ever 3rd (updated)

3rd last year, Waseda University scored its first Izumo Ekiden win since 2010, taking almost 2 minutes off the CR and leading the top 7 teams under the old record of 2:07:51 for the complete 6-stage, 45.1 km course. Waseda was 16 seconds back in 7th after the First Stage, but its 2nd runner Ojiro Honda made that up easily and put them 6 seconds out front. A massive 22:56 CR for the 8.5 km Third Stage by Shadrack Kipkemei (Nihon Univ.) dropped Waseda back to 2nd even though its runner Ryuki Suzuki broke the old CR too, but back-to-back CR on the next 2 stages by 1st-year Haruki Niizuma and Shunpei Yamaguchi put anchor Shinsaku Kudo out of reach of the rest of the field. Kudo duly won the 10.2 km anchor stage in 29:00, bypassing a 2:06 time entirely for a new 2:05:56 CR, just under 2:48/km average pace for the complete course. Defending champ Koku Gakuin University struggled a bit in the first half of the race but came on strong in the longer second half with 4th and 5th runners...

Kipyegon Repeats, Toyo Wins Hakone Ekiden Qualifier in First Appearance in 21 Years

Back for the first time in 21 years after a disastrous 14th-place finish at the 102nd Hakone Ekiden this past January, Toyo University hit one out of western Tokyo's Showa Kinen Park with a solid win at the Hakone Ekiden Yosenkai, the half marathon that serves as the official qualifying race for the 103rd Hakone Ekiden. The top 10 teams in the Hakone auto-qualify for the following year, with the rest having to run the Yosenkai in October with a squad of 10 to 16 runners out of which the top 10 score on aggregate time, with the 10 fastest schools joining the Hakone field and top individuals from non-qualifying teams names to the Kanto Region Student Alliance select team to make up the complete Hakone field of 21. Driven in large part by an aggressive run from 3rd-year Yu Miyazaki , one of only 2 Japanese athletes to go with the big African contingent up front, Toyo won in 10:31:30, 1:03:09 or 2:59.6/km per athlete. As the first team to have broken the 3:00/km average pace barrie...

Ngetich and Mutiso Take Down Tokyo Legacy Half CR

In its 5th edition the Tokyo Legacy Half Marathon scored 2 new course records via Kenyans from the Ikaika agency, with 10 km WR holder Agnes Ngetich blasting 3 minutes off the old record to win by over 4 in 1:04:23, and Alexander Mutiso skimming just 1 second under the CR for the win by 5 seconds in 59:51. The 2 races played out completely differently, even if the paydays were the same for the winners. Surrounded by an envelope of male runners all the way to the final 100 m, Ngetich was out hard on the downhill in the first 5 km, hitting it on sub-64 pace in 15:08 before leveling out on the flat middle 10 km. Her next 2 splits projected to 1:04:09 and 1:04:17, and even with the uphill back to the stadium in the last 5 km she didn't fall far off from that, winning in 1:04:23. Runner-up Tabitha Njeri Kamau was nearly a mile back in 1:08:28, with Kamau's Mitsui Sumitomo Kaijo teammate Kazuna Kanetomo dropping a 1:10:17 PB for 3rd. Now an independent, track Olympian Kaede Ha...

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