The Beppu-Oita Mainichi Marathon was held to qualify for the Paris Olympics representative selection race. Shungo Yokota, a fourth-year student at Aoyama Gakuin University, finished fourth with a time of 2 hours, 7 minutes and 47 seconds, breaking the Japanese student record for 20 years. Updated for the first time in a while.
At the tournament, six players, including Yokota, won the right to participate in the national team selection race.
The marathon representative selection race for the Paris Olympics to be held on October 15th, the MGC = Marathon Grand Championship, will start at Oita City's aquarium "Umitamago" and finish at Oita Municipal Athletic Stadium. It was contested on the course.
The race progressed at a pace of about 3 minutes per kilometer from the beginning, and after the pacemaker came off after 30 kilometers, two invited foreign riders escaped, and six Japanese riders made up the second group.
Yokota, who ran the 3rd section of Aoyama Gakuin University in the Hakone Ekiden last month, was temporarily separated from the second group before 40km, but he caught up with a tenacious run.
In the end, he finished in 4th place, the second highest among Japanese players, with a time of 2 hours, 7 minutes and 47 seconds, breaking the Japanese student record by 25 seconds for the first time in 20 years.
Yokota said, "I was confident and I was able to run comfortably. He was stubborn in the end. What he did this season was not wrong."
6 players including Yokota qualified for MGC
The top three Japanese players were Tsubasa Ichiyama, who finished in 2:07:44, followed by Ichiyama and Yokota, followed by Shin Kimura in 6th, Tsukasa Koyama in 7th, and Naoya Sakuta in 10th. A total of six players, Kazuki Muramoto, who finished in 13th place, have earned the right to participate in the MGC.
The winner was Djibouti's Ibrahim Hassan, who set a new tournament record of 2:06:43.