Tamirat Tola wins Olympic marathon for Ethiopia While Eluid Kipchoge Falls Out of the Race

Today, Ethiopia’s Tamirat Tola won the gold medal in the Olympic marathon. Tora, who had been leading for most of the race, clocked a time of 2:06:21, thereby breaking the record for the race.

The 32-year-old athlete has become good at excelling in warmer conditions after he got his first big win in the World Athletics Championships in Eugene, Ore, in 2022, which was a summer race with uncomfortable situations and then went on to win again in New York last November in another uncomfortable warm condition.

During the Olympics Marathon, which he won earlier today, he displayed the aggressive style that befits a runner on a serious hot streak.

After letting the little-known Eyob Faniel of Italy lead for most of the race’s first half, Tola made his first move just before the halfway mark.
He stayed at the front or close to it the rest of the way, bringing in the power at the 20-mile mark, surging up a hill through the forest west of the French city limits to create a gap that began at more than 10 seconds between him and the chasers and stretching it out to 21 seconds by the time it was over.

“In my life, this is my great achievement,” said Tola, who assured himself a hallowed spot in Ethiopian culture with his win. In a society that reveres its distance runners, Tola’s name will now be uttered in the same sentences as Abebe Bekele, the first East African to win the Olympic marathon when he covered the distance without shoes in Rome in 1960. Bekele won again in 1964 in Tokyo, the start of a more than half-century of near dominance of long-distance racing by East Africans.

Belgium’s Bashir Abdi finished second, getting the silver medal, and Kenya’s Benson Kipruto took the bronze in third place.
Eliud Kipchoge of Kenya, a two-time gold medalist and the only man to run the distance in less than two hours suffered from cramping early in the race, fell to the back of the pack and did not finish, likely an unfortunate conclusion to a storied Olympic career for the man widely considered the sport’s greatest ever marathoner.

Tola didn’t even make the Ethiopian team initially. He was the reserve until Sisay Lemma, the Boston Marathon champion, got injured. Tola had kept himself in shape and was ready to fill in.

“I trained hard so I could win,” Tola said. “I was fully prepared and knew I could fulfil my dream.

Tola ran the first half in 1 hour, four minutes, 51 seconds and the second half in 1 hour, 1 minute, 35 seconds. He had a winning strategy that worked for him, and the golden price in the marathon came with it.