Skip to main content

Championship Ekiden Season Wraps Sunday


Championship ekiden season wraps up Sunday with its last two big events. In Kitakyushu, the 35th Kitakyushu Women's Invitational Ekiden brings together top high school, college and corporate league teams to race a short 27.2 km in five stages, with the longest leg split in two for the high school teams. University teams are absent this time except for one select team made up of women from the area, while the corporate league division has nine teams and the high school division 22 plus another select team.

2023 Queens Ekiden national champion Sekisui Kagaku is the top seed, its entry roster including members of its national title-winning lineup, Yuma Yamamoto, Rina Sasaki and Chikako Mori. Its closest competition is Queens 8th-placer Iwatani Sangyo, which has five of its six runners from the national championships entered including Kaede Kawamura, winner of the anchor stage at last weekend's National Women's Ekiden.

2023 National High School Ekiden winner Kamimura Gakuen H.S. leads the high school division and has its entire champion team on its Kitakyushu roster including sub-15 runner Caroline Kariba. Nationals 3rd-placer Ritsumeikan Uji H.S., 4th-placer Kunei Joshi Gakuin H.S., 6th-placer Suma Gakuen H.S. and 9th-placer Ginga Gakuin H.S.are also in the race, with 7th-placer Chikushi Joshi Gakuen H.S. a late scratch. The race will be broadcast live on BS-TBS starting at 10:00 a.m. local time, and JRN will be on location in Kitakyushu. There might be streaming on the RKB Sports Live! Youtube channel.


As soon as Kitakyushu is done, the 29th National Men's Ekiden goes off in Hiroshima with a live commercial-free national broadcast on NHK. Like the National Women's Ekiden, the men's race features teams from all 47 prefectures made up of each one's best junior high school, high school, collegiate and corporate league runners, in the men's case racing 48.0 km in seven stages of 3.0 to 13.0 km length.

When the event returned last year for its first post-pandemic edition Nagano took 1 second off its own CR from the last pre-pandemic edition in 2020 as it won for a record-setting ninth time in 2:17:10. It's back with a strong lineup including high school 5000 m NR holder Hiroto Yoshioka (Juntendo Univ.), 27:30.69 10000 m runner Mebuki Suzuki (Komazawa Univ.), 1:01:50 half marathoner Taishi Ito (Waseda Univ.), and four members of 2023 National High School Ekiden CR break Saku Chosei H.S., Soma Nagahara, Shunpei Yamaguchi, Yamato Hamaguchi and Kazuma Shino.

2023 runner-up Saitama and 3rd-placer Tokyo are down on strength this year, but 4th-placer Chiba has a quality lineup led by 2024 Hakone Ekiden First Stage winner Kotaro Shinohara (Komazawa Univ.). Hakone Second Stage winner Asahi Kuroda (Aoyama Gakuin Univ.) and his younger brother Zen Kuroda (Tamano Konan H.S.) lead 5th-placer Okayama, while the Rakunan H.S.-heavy 6th-placer Kyoto is feeling the absence of the star of its 2023 team, Keita Sato (Komazawa Univ.) who is skipping the ekiden this year for altitude training in the U.S. in prep for February's Millrose Games.

2023 7th-placer Hiroshima is led by another member of Hakone champ Aoyama Gakuin University, Ninth Stage winner Genta Kuramoto. 8th-placer Hyogo, a five-time winner, has a very decent lineup including 13:18.49 runner Yuta Bando (Fujitsu) and National High School Ekiden First Stage winner Sota Orita (Suma Gakuen H.S.). 9th-placer Miyagi saw its women pull of an anchor stage upset last weekend, but Hakone uphill Fifth Stage star Shunsuke Kikuchi (Daito Bunka Univ.) will have a tough time duplicating his role in scoring a top 10 overall finish for his team. 10th-placer Ibaraki is led by 2:06 marathoner Kyohei Hosoya and Yushin Akatsu of Hakone runner-up Komazawa University.

© 2024 Brett Larner, all rights reserved

Buy Me A Coffee

Labels:

Comments

Stefan said…
Iwatani Sangyo should do very well here and could challenge Sekisui Kagaku especially as they are without some of their top runners, notably Hitomi Niiya and Sayaka Sato. I would like to see the underdogs Iwatani Sangyo turn the tables and start 2024 off to a great start. I'll be focused on Kaede Kawamura to see how she has recovered from her superb 10k effort last Sunday.

Also noticed Mao Ichiyama is running in the half marathon at 10th Official Okukuma Road Race Tournament on Sunday. Hopefully, she has a good run there.
https://twitter.com/Shiseido_rc/status/1748258995377238332
January 20, 2024 at 4:58 AM
Post a Comment

Most-Read This Week

Murayama and Sasaki Making U.S. Debut at New York Mini 10 km

Every year since 2012 that there's been a United Airlines NYC Half , JRN has partnered with the NYRR and November's Ageo City Half Marathon to bring two top-tier collegiate Japanese men to the NYC Half for what's usually been their international debuts. For years we've wanted to extend that program to include top collegiate women, but that has always faced 2 problems. For one, while the half marathon distance is the main focus for Japanese collegiate men due to the stage lengths at the Hakone Ekiden, few collegiate women run it. Those that do run the National University Women's Half Marathon in Matsue, held the same day as the NYC Half. This year, though, we're finally making it happen in a slightly different way. Amisa Murayama and Nazuki Sasaki of 2025 Mt. Fuji Women's Ekiden national collegiate championship runner-up Tohoku Fukushi University are joining the field for the NYRR's Mastercard New York Mini 10 km on June 6. After running an 18:14 CR ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Australian YouTuber Handed Lifetime Ban by Ageo City Half Marathon After Running 1:06 with Another Runner's Bib (updated)

After discussion with their race's chief JAAF referee, on Nov. 27 the organizers of the Ageo City Half Marathon handed down a lifetime ban from their event against 36-year-old Australian Matt Inglis Fox  for running the Nov. 15 race wearing the bib number of another JAAF-registered runner. The incident came to light after Fox posted on his personal Instagram account that he had run a PB of 1:06:33 and finished 203rd in Ageo with a 10 km split of 31:03, along with photos and video of himself in the race wearing a bib number beginning with 11. Fox did not appear in the results by name or in that time or place, the closest match being a 1:06:54 gross, 1:06:50 net finish time with a 31:21 10 km split for 18th place in the JAAF-registered division and 209th overall by bib number 1129, registered to a non-Japanese Tokyo-resident club runner. The club runner, Harrisson Uk , readily confirmed that he had given his bib to Fox, saying, "I gave my number to Matt. It wasn't me."...
82 comments
Read more

Some Reflections on the Ekiden

by Brett Larner This ekiden season I've had a few thoughts kicking around, and watching this week's Hakone Ekiden a few of them became clearer.  These are still in progress, but at the moment this is what I'm thinking in terms of running as a spectator sport and about the quality of Japanese men's distance running right now. Quality: Japanese men's running is coming up very, very quickly.  I was in the lead car at November's Ageo City Half Marathon , where 18 men, 17 of them university runners, broke 63 minutes.  As it was going on we all thought it was a slow race because there were so many people running that pace all the way, no separation at all in the mass of the pack. See the JRN header photo above, taken just past halfway.  That's pretty unusual in Japan, especially at the university level; generally you'll get a handful of guys who run an aggressive pace and a mass running dead on a safe pace, 3:00/km in a half marathon, for example. Th...
18 comments
Read more