Category — Marathon

Italian marathoner Stefano Baldini or Chinese hurdler Liu Xiang?

PHOTO SOURCE: stefanobaldini.net

Here’s Italian marathoner and 2004 Athens gold medalist Stefano Baldini’s road to Beijing:

1. Participate in the 2008 London marathon as part of his Olympic preparation
2. Unfortunately develop a stress fracture in his left leg
3. Miss 30 days of training

It isn’t clear how much this reduced training period will affect Baldini’s goal to defend his Olympic title.

PHOTO CREDIT: BBC

This is interesting. Some countries are finding it hard to find someone to represent them in the Olympics but New Zealand must have an abundance of talents as it has rejected two marathoners despite these two clocking “A-standard times”.

But what exactly is “A-standard time”? Well, we don’t know but we might do a future post on it if we find out what it means. Hehe.

Anyways, the Sunday Star Times reports that one of those rejected by Athletics NZ, Liza Hunter-Galvan, has “engaged an American lawyer to fight her case to be in the New Zealand team for Beijing”.

Is this the first time, someone had to file a case to be included in an Olympic team?

Hunter-Galvan isn’t the only one frustrated with Athletics NZ. According to the Star-Times, marathoner Michael Aish, who’s also not picked has “had enough after a decade of frustration with Athletics NZ”.

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If you were the head of a national Olympic team, you’d be glad to have Isaiah Kiplagat’s problem: picking who to send to the Beijing Olympics from a pool of world champion marathoners.

Here’s his take on the matter according to Xinhua:

“Kenyan athletes won a total of 50 marathon races last year and so far they have won 25 therefore you will agree with me that coming up with six names from such a pool is a monumental task,” Kiplagat said.

Eventually, Kenya’s athletics officials named the following for the men’s marathon team: 2008 London Marathon winner Martin Lel, his runner up in the same race Samuel Wanjiru and this week’s winner of the Boston marathon Robert Cheruiyot.

World marathon Champion Luke Kibet and winner of this year’s Rotterdam marathon William Kipsang are on standby.

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Mongolia’s Serod Batochir bagged the marathon gold medal in the Good Luck Beijing 2008 preparatory games for the main show in August. Will Serod repeat as a gold medalist in the Olympic Games? Unlikely.

His run which clocked two hours, 30 minutes and 42 seconds is just too far away from those recorded by Athens 2004 medalists (where the bronze medalist clocked 2:12:11). Also, the current marathon world record is 2:04:26 by Ethiopia’s Haile Gebrselassie. By the way, as we reported earlier, Haile has decided to not compete in the marathon because of health concerns.

Photo credit: Associated Press.