Udine 2007 logo (© c)
MonteCarloThe reigning World Road Running champions Zersenay Tadesse of Eritrea and Lornah Kiplagat of the Netherlands are on the entry list for the 2nd IAAF World Road Running Championships which take place in Udine, Italy on Sunday 14 October.
Tadesse and Kiplagat were the winners of the inaugural edition of the championships which took place last year in Debrecen, Hungary over the distance of 20km (8 Oct 2006).
The second outing for the World Road Running Championships is at the Half Marathon distance and will be contested on a 7000m loop through the streets of Udine.
In Debrecen last year, Kiplagat famously came home in the World record of 1:03:21 for 20km, and while the distance may have changed for the 2007 championships we will still have a World record holder for the race distance on course in Udine. Samuel Wanjiru, who broke the World record for the men’s Half Marathon with a 58:33 run on the 17 March this year in The Hague, will lead the Kenyan team challenge in Udine.
Tadesse and Kiplagat, continued their fine form in 2007 capturing the World Cross Country Championship titles in Mombasa last spring. Since then their campaigns have seen the Eritrean, who is the Olympic 10,000m bronze medallist, come just short of the World Championship track podium over 10,000m in Osaka (4th, 27:21.37), while Kiplagat, after a fifth place finish at the London Marathon, was largely side-lined this summer by a calf strain which meant she missed the Osaka World Champs.
Both runners have stated that the defence of their titles in Udine is their main goal of the season, and so we are assured of another fine display of road running from some of the world’s best.
Udine is a city which lies 100m above sea level in the middle of Friuli-Venezia Giulia region in northeastern Italy. Located 100km north east of Venice, near the borders of Slovenia and Austria, Udine has approximately 100,000 inhabitants.
The climate is rather mild with the average temperature about 15°C and average humidity of 70%, no rain, at the time of the Championships.
Chris Turner for the IAAF
