(BOSTON) – Sisay Lemma of Ethiopia set a blistering pace and held on to win the Boston Marathon on Monday, running alone most of the way to finish in 2 hours, 6 minutes and 17 seconds – tenth fastest time in the 128 of the race. -year of history.
Hellen Obiri defended her title in the women’s race, overtaking fellow Kenyan Sharon Lokedi on Boylston Street to win by eight seconds. Obiri is the first woman to win consecutive Boston Marathons since 2005.
Lemma arrived in Boston with the fastest time in the field, becoming just the fourth person to break 2:02:00 when he won in Valencia last year. And the 2021 London champion showed it on the course, breaking away from the pack in Ashland and opening up a lead of more than half a mile.
Lemma ran the first half in 60:19 – 99 seconds faster than Geoffrey Mutai’s record pace in 2011, when he finished in 2:03:02 – the fastest marathon in history up to that point. Fellow Ethiopian Mohamed Esa closed the gap in the final kilometers, finishing second by 41 seconds; two-time champion Evans Chebet came third.
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Lemma fell to the ground and rolled onto his back, smiling, after crossing the finish line.
“I decided I wanted to start fast and early,” said Lemma, whose victory in London in 2021 was her only other major marathon win. “I kept the pace and won.”
On a day when sunshine and temperatures rising into the mid-60s had runners scrambling for water — to drink and to pour over their heads — Obiri ran with an unusually large leader group of 15 through Brookline before heading to separate. Lokedi came second and two-time Boston winner Edna Kiplagat third.
Switzerland’s Marcel Hug straightened up after hitting a barrier while turning too fast and still breaking the course record in the men’s wheelchair race. It was his seventh Boston victory and his 14th consecutive major marathon victory.
Hug already had a four-minute lead, about 18 miles, when he reached the historic fire station turnaround in Newton, where the course heads onto Commonwealth Avenue on the way to Heartbreak Hill. He fell into the fence, turning sideways onto his left wheel, but quickly recovered.
“It was my fault,” Hug said. “I had a lot of weight, a lot of pressure from above on the steering, so I couldn’t drive.”
Hug finished in 1:15:33, winning by 5:04 and breaking his previous course record by 1:33. 22-year-old British Eden Rainbow-Cooper won the women’s wheelchair race in 1:35:11, her first major marathon victory; she is the third youngest woman to win the Boston Wheelchair Race.
The sleepy New England town of Hopkinton celebrated its 100th anniversary as the starting point of the Boston Marathon on Monday, sending a field of 17 former champions and nearly 30,000 other runners on their way. Near the end on Boylston Street, 26.2 miles away, authorities marked the anniversary of the 2013 bombing that killed three people and injured hundreds more.
Sunny skies and minimal wind greeted the runners, with temperatures that reached 60 degrees in the late morning. As the field passed through Natick, the fourth of eight towns on the course, athletes splashed water on themselves to cool off.
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“We couldn’t ask for a better day,” said former New England Patriots tight end Rob Gronkowski, the grand marshal, before getting into an electric car that would take him along the route. , no matter the event. The weather is perfect, the energy is pumping.”
The festivities began around 6 a.m., when race director Dave McGillivray dismissed about 30 members of the Massachusetts National Guard. Lt. Col. Paula Reichert Karsten, one of the protesters, said she wanted to be part of a “quintessential Massachusetts event.”
The starting line was painted to say “100 Years in Hopkinton,” commemorating the move from Ashland to Hopkinton in 1924 to conform to the official Olympic Marathon distance. The announcer welcomed the crowd gathered to the “sleepy little town of Hopkinton, 364 days a year.”
“In Hopkinton, it’s probably the coolest thing in town,” said Maggie Agosto, a 16-year-old resident who went to the starting line with a friend to watch the race.
The annual race on Patriots’ Day, a state holiday commemorating the beginning of the Revolutionary War, also took place on One Boston Day, when the city remembers the victims of the 2013 marathon bombings. At the finish line on Boylston Street, the bagpipes accompanied Governor Maura Healey, Boston Mayor Michelle Wu and members of the victims’ families as they laid a pair of wreaths at the sites of the explosions.
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This story corrects that Hug won his seventh victory in Boston.
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Associated Press writer Jennifer McDermott in Hopkinton contributed to this report.
This story originally appeared on Time.com read the full story
