Boston Footnotes

A few footnotes to wrapup our coverage of the 111th Boston Marathon which took place on Monday 16 April.

Robert Cheruiyot's small tribe

Boston Marathon champion Robert Kipkoech Cheruiyot is now the eighth man to have won three or more Boston Marathon victories. The sixth was also the first Kenyan to win in Boston, Ibrahim Hussein, and after his victory on Monday Cheruiyot pointed out another reason why he and Hussein are now the only members of a very small tribe: both are Kenyans who won one Boston, then went two years without a win there before returning to win twice consecutively.

American Bill Rodgers and Canadian Gerard Cote also had Boston victories with the same pattern (Rodgers in 1975, 1978 and 1979 and Cote in 1940, 1943 and 1944), but both of them went on to a fourth victory, Rodgers in 1980 and Cote in 1948. Cheruiyot is under no illusions about the difficulty he might have matching their records. Citing the difficulty he had winning this year's race, he suggested that the effort required to win a fourth might be enough to kill him: "Maybe if I win next year, I will die."

Cheruiyot also claimed kinship with another Kenyan who was a triple winner in Boston, Cosmas Ndeti. Ndeti, who won three in a row from 1993 to 1995 and set the 2:07:15 course record Cheruiyot broke in 2006, was a training partner of Cheruiyot's when the latter was hoping to break into the ranks of Kenya's professional runners. "I thought then, why not me?" said Cheruiyot.

Cheruiyot expressed no concern about the pedestrian early pace, pointing out that the pack reached halfway in 1:08, then ran the second half significantly faster. "Everybody was around," he said, indicating the size of the pack, "but nobody wanted to go. 35 km, that is where you start a marathon."

Cheruiyot also hopes this win will put the story of his horrifying slip and fall at the finish of the 2006 Chicago Marathon to rest. "I don't like to think about it," he says, emphasizing that he had put the incident from his mind as he approached the Boston finish.

Asked about his future plans, he said he would "relax a little bit," but that he would return for another marathon in the fall, though he has not yet determined which one.

Grigoryeva adapts perfectly, but doesn't lock up Olympic spot

Women's champion Lidia Grigoryeva, like many who faced the storm-driven headwind on Monday, came to Boston prepared for a faster race. "Conditions forced changes," she said, and she was prepared to stay with the slow lead group and not push in the early stages of the race. She claimed that from her position at the back of the lead pack, sheltered from the wind, she had watched 2006 London Marathon champion Deena Kastor struggling on some downhill sections, and that also changed her opinion about who she would have to beat in order to win.

The wind was almost familiar; conditions in the Russian's altitude training base of Kislovodsk, where she chose training courses to match Boston's rolling profile, were similar. "I make a lot of training in the wind," she explained through an interpreter.

Unlike Cheruiyot, who claimed that "the lion does not look back when he is hunting the antelope," Grigoryeva looked back twice after establishing her lead. "The first time," she explained, "I checked that I had a gap. The second time, I checked to make sure it was still there."

A two-time Olympic 10,000m runner, Grigoryeva was confident about her closing speed, but emphasized that the marathon is about more than simply being fast. "It's carrying the speed to the finish line," she said; having speed doesn't help if the runner is too tired to use it.

Grigoryeva came to Boston hoping to give herself an advantage in Russia's Olympic marathon team selection, but her slow winning time is unlikely to rank highly on their annual list. While she will probably try for a faster time on another course this year, Grigoryeva hopes that her win in Boston might be as important to the selectors as a fast time in a losing race.

Prokopcuka's training

Second-place finisher Jelena Prokopcuka, runner up in Boston for the second year in a row, admitted that a case of the flu had affected her training a month before the marathon, and she had arrived with less than perfect training. In the post-race press conference, however, Prokopcuka demonstrated evidence of hard training in other areas. A Latvian who relied on a translator when she first won the New York City Marathon in 2005, Prokopcuka not only handled the English press conference without a translator, but also interjected in Russian to questions posed (in Russian) to Grigoryeva, explaining her contributions to a polite verbal exchange the two had late in the race.

In finishing second, Prokopcuka slightly improved her lead in the World Marathon Majors series, where she now leads Boston fourth-placer Rita Jeptoo 55 points to 35 points.

U.S. Championship for Kastor

The silver lining behind a disappointing fifth place for Deena Kastor, the fastest female marathoner of 2006, was taking the 2007 U.S. national marathon title. Kastor will carry that into next year's U.S. Olympic Trials Marathon, which will be held in Boston on the Sunday before the 2008 marathon. Second place went to Ann Alyanak, ninth overall in 2:38:55; both Kastor and Alyanak qualified for selection to the U.S. team for the World Championships in Osaka; that team will be finalized on April 30, according to USA Track and Field.

Parker Morse for the IAAF

Click here for the original race report