On Jan. 11 Asahi Kuroda, winner of the highly competitive Second Stage for overall champion Aoyama Gakuin University at the 100th Hakone Ekiden on Jan. 2, announced that his next race will be the Jan. 21 National Men's Ekiden in Hiroshima. At the seven-stage, 48.0 km race he said he hopes to be on a stage adjacent to the one his younger brother Zen Kuroda of Tamano Mitsunan H.S. runs so that they can hand off the tasuki together.
Two stages at the National Men's Ekiden are for collegiate and corporate league runners, three are reserved for high schoolers, and two for junior high school athletes. Representing Okayama prefecture, the older Kuroda brother is scheduled to run the 8.5 km Third Stage, with the younger brother, who will enter the Aoyama Gakuin team in April, is set to run the 5.0 km Fourth Stage. "This will be the first time we've run an ekiden together since I was in my third year of high school and he was in his first," said Asahi. "I'm really psyched. We'll give it all for Okayama."
The brothers' father Masayoshi Kuroda, 42, was 3rd on the Hakone Ekiden's First Stage during his first year at Hosei University in 2001, part of the "Orange Express" led by Kazuyoshi Tokumoto, 44, now head coach of Surugadai University. Zen was 2nd in the 3000 m steeplechase at last summer's National High School Track and Field Championships.
Asahi and Zen's younger sister Rikka Kuroda, a 3rd-year at Kyoyama J.H.S., won last year's National Junior High School Track and Field Championships 1500 m final, and at December's National Junior High School Ekiden she anchored Kyoyama to the win to beat her older brothers to the punch of winning a national ekiden title. According to Aoyama Gakuin head coach and Kuroda family friend Susumu Hara, 56, the youngest daughter in the family, Shiika Kuroda, still in kindergarten, also has high potential to be a fast runner.
At the National Women's Ekiden this Sunday, Rikka will run on the Okayama prefecture team and will hand off the tasuki with the biggest start of last year's Nationals, Sherry Drury, now a 1st-year at Tsuyama H.S. "January will be a Kuroda family ekiden festival stretching from Hakone all the way to the National Men's Ekiden," said coach Hara. There'll be more of that to come when Zen falls under Hara's leadership at Aoyama Gakuin University in the coming year.
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translated by Brett Larner
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