Previews16 Apr 2010


Merga, Kosgei ready to defend – Boston Marathon preview

FacebookTwitterEmail

Salina Kosgei edges Dire Tune to win the 113th Boston Marathon (© Getty Images)

Boston, Massachusetts, USAOn Monday morning (19th) the B.A.A. Boston Marathon will, for the 114th time, pitch a field of ambitious athletes against the strategic puzzle of a famously challenging course. Several previous champions, including last year's victors Deriba Merga and Salina Kosgei, will lead a field of approximately 25,000 starters from the suburban village of Hopkinton to Boston's Back Bay on a course intended in 1897 as a reverent imitation of the route from Marathon to Athens--hills and all.

Scheduled annually on the Massachusetts state holiday of Patriots' Day, commemorating the start of the American revolution, the Marathon, an IAAF Gold Label Road Race, shares the day with events from battle re-enactments to baseball games. With two-thirds as many starters in Hopkinton as would fit in baseball's Fenway Park and thousands more packing the edges of the course to watch the developing drama, Patriots' Day is also known as Marathon Monday.

Merga, Goumri and Keflezighi top men's field

There's only one previous champion in the men's field, 2009 victor Deriba Merga. Four-time winner Robert K. Cheruiyot, among the most successful marathoners of the past decade, withdrew in late March due to a training injury. Merga's racing since his Boston win has not been as sparkling as his win here, but Boston has a lengthy history of stars who only seemed to be able to win in Boston. If Merga has the fitness to race, he may find himself in front once again.

The fastest PB in the field, however, belongs to Abderrahim Goumri, the Moroccan veteran who has racked up second-place finishes in Chicago, New York, and London. In search of a victory, Goumri has brought his runner-up record and 2:05:30 credentials to Boston, where Cheruiyot's course record is a minute and fourty-four seconds slower than Goumri's PB.

Next to Goumri and Merga comes 2009 ING New York City Marathon champion Meb Keflezighi, the 2004 Olympic silver medallist. After finally putting together a major win in New York, Keflezighi heads one of the deepest fields of American marathoners to start in Boston in recent memory; another notable starter is Ryan Hall, whose PB of 2:06:17 stands behind only Khalid Khannouchi on the U.S. list.

The Boston field is always well-populated with surprises, talented young athletes hoping for a first big win in a historic race, and none in the 2010 field is quite as intriguing as Ethiopia's Chala Dechase. Dechase's first big win was at the Great Ethiopian Run 10K in Addis Ababa, where second place went to Merga, and he challenged the great Haile Gebrselassie in the closing kilometres of the Dubai International Marathon in January.

Experience is king in Boston, however. Former champion Juma Ikangaa, who was defeated several times by the Boston course before finally earning his win, once declared, "It is not the hills themselves which are difficult, it is where they are placed on the course which is hard." The proper budgeting of effort for the early downhills and late climbing this course requires generally only comes to first-timers by lucky accident.

Kosgei, Tune, and Grigoryeva the class of the women

Unlike the men's field, the Boston women, who will start some 28 minutes before the mass start, features each of the last three champions: Salina Kosgei (2009), Dire Tune (2008), and Lidiya Grigoryeva (2007). Kosgei and Tune won their tiles by a combined total of three seconds, Kosgei defeating Tune by a single tick last year and Tune winning by two seconds the year before that. If the combination doesn't make for a tight competition in 2010, at the very least it means there are scores to be settled.

Kosgei and Grigoryeva had relatively successful late-2009 races, with Kosgei taking fifth in New York and Grigoryeva third in Chicago, but Tune has not run a marathon since finishing 23rd at the World Championships marathon last summer in Berlin.

Like the men, the women's field includes a number of intriguing newcomers. The fastest this year is the Ethiopian Teyba Erkesso, a mainstay of Ethiopia's World Cross Country teams (she has four team gold medals from that event) and a 2:23:53 marathoner. Erkesso ran that time just this January in Houston, breaking a course record set in 2008 by Tune just before her Boston win; Erkesso also set up a half-marathon PB of 1:07:41 in Ras Al Khaimah in February.

Rising interest, early closing

With a 25,000-runner cap on the field size and interest in marathon running on the rise throughout the USA, this year's Boston Marathon closed entries in mid-November of 2009, only 65 days after opening and earlier than at any time in its history. Race officials say they have no plans to change Boston's unique qualifying system for the 115th running in 2011, and that they are investigating ways to increase the entry cap. Like Fenway Park, which is considered small among modern baseball fields, the Boston Marathon's historic course is too narrow in places for the massive fields which hit the roads in London, New York, Chicago and Berlin, and the town of Hopkinton is strained to bursting by the crowds at the start. The B.A.A. hopes to address these problems in coming years to accommodate the growing crowds of qualified runners.

Parker Morse for the IAAF

Pages related to this article
Disciplines
Loading...