Congratulations to Ethiopians Girmay Birhanu Gebru and Fatuma Sado Dergo, the men’s and women’s winners of the 34th Beijing International Marathon that was run today in “very unhealthy” to “hazardous” air. It was so bad that Xinhua even called it “smog” in an article that begins with this incredible factoid:

China’s bid to win the women’s race of the Beijing International Marathon for the 23rd straight year was thwarted on Sunday as Ethiopian Fatuma Sado Dergo braved the smog to finish first in the 42.195-kilometer run in two hours, 30 minutes and 3 seconds.

A twenty-two-year-old record was snapped, and every picture on the Internet is of runners in face masks. That’s what happens when you subject 30,000 runners to your headlong rush for GDP. Not that this guy seemed to mind:

Gebru (not pictured) won with the time of 2:10:42.

Gebru had hoped to break the tournament record of 2:07:16, set by Ethiopian Tadese Tola one year ago, but it turned out to be almost five minutes shy of his personal best (2:05:49).

“It was a tough game, but I was satisfied with what I did to finish the match. Looking forward to coming back to Beijing next year,” said Gebru.

Beijing welcomes you.

(Top image via @PDChina)

Via China News: “April 13, 2014, Pyongyang, DPRK, Kim Il-sung Stadium hosted the 27th annual Mangyongdae Prize International Marathon to commemorate the late Kim Il-sung, Great Leader of North Korea. According to the Associated Press, this year’s race was the first time foreign travelers were allowed to participate.”

AP’s recap:

Tens of thousands of North Koreans lined the streets to applaud, cheer and sometimes high-five the runners, who were followed by a truck blaring patriotic music. They stood and roared as North Korea’s Pak Chol, who completed the men’s event in 2 hours, 12 minutes and 26 seconds, crossed the finish line. Compatriots Kim Hye Gyong and her twin sister, Kim Hye Song, finished first and second in the women’s race. The winning women’s time was 2:27:04.

Some of the foreigners who participated — history-makers — spoke to AP about the experience afterwards. They may have been amateur runners, but their bromides were pure professional:

“I really wanted to do this race because of the location,” said 10-kilometer runner Jen Skym, a 32-year-old Briton living in Hong Kong, who is also four months pregnant. “The scenery was fantastic, and there were so many people watching. It was good motivation to get back into running. I really enjoyed it.”

…”I go to international races every year, but this one just strikes me as the most unique,” said Jacob Young, of Nova Scotia, Canada. “It’s very novel. Usually I would imagine it’s the tourists here looking out at the local people. Here, it’s them looking at us. We are the show.”

…”Basically, we just had to wear regular running clothes,” said Will Erskine, of Melbourne, Australia. “Some people might have wanted to shoot pictures the whole time. But I don’t think it was all that unusual. It was a good experience.”

Here, it’s them looking at us. Jacob Young would love living in inland China.

All in all, it sounds like it was a fun time. Don’t know if anyone had more fun than this lady in the front row though:

Some more pictures via China News:

These guys are not worried.

Pictures sent by Charles Desmeules from the Beijing Marathon on Sunday.

Obviously the practice of smearing one’s face with black paint has no racial context in this country — one that’s relatively blunt about race on all occasions, usually without offense intended – but for a team of runners sponsored by a global company like adidas, someone really should’ve tapped an organizer on the shoulder and nixed this photo-op, yeah?

Lee Mack of City Weekend, who was sent this picture by an expat at yesterday’s Beijing Marathon, makes this rather apt comparison:

We can only assume that the athletes were in blackface as some sort of twisted tribute to the fact that marathoning is mainly dominated by African runners these days? It reminds us of the controversy surrounding Spanish athletes who made Asian slanty-eyes before the 2008 Olympics and got hammered for it all over the world media. Regardless, it’s in extremely poor taste and is a slap in the face to face of the spirit of the marathon.

We’ve reached out to adidas for comment.

In other Beijing Marathon news, pictures of runners urinating on the streets suddenly seem less jarring by comparison.

Racist Adidas Event at Beijing Marathon (City Weekend)

UPDATE, 10/22, 10:53 am: Here’s a picture of other adidas-sponsored runners at the Chongqing Marathon in March, as taken by Patrick Burton:

UPDATE, 10/23, 10:19 am: an adidas representative emailed:

This was intended to be a marketing promotion for our new running footwear. Promoters were painted black in order to draw attention and create a contrast against the colourful adidas running shoes that were being promoted. Under no circumstances did adidas China intend to offend anyone by this activity and we are deeply sorry to those who felt offended.

The 33rd year of the Beijing Marathon yesterday saw 30,000 participants run underneath a blue sky and a beautiful little sun. Those who completed the full course started west from Tiananmen and then turned north toward Olympic Green, with Ethiopian Tadese Tola winning the men’s race with a new event record time of 2:07:16 and China’s Zhang Yingying winning the women’s title in 2:31:19. By all accounts, it was glorious.

Leave it to the media to point this out though:

“Runners left quite a bit behind,” says the CCTV news anchor.

Don’t worry, it’s a non-story. Trash is left behind at marathons the world over, and one eyewitness’s statement about a lack of refuse bins was countered by another eyewitness’s statement about how it only takes an hour to clean up all the litter.

This is more amusing:

A Great Wall of runners who somehow didn’t perspire enough while running a marathon. A Yellow River runs wild in the heart of Beijing.

You know who we really feel for in that above picture? The runner in red, who’s probably getting a healthy dose of urine on the top of his shoe. If ever there were a time for a funnel…

UPDATE, 6:49 pm: Below are two more pictures. “A participant surnamed Zhou, who claims to have run the Beijing Marathon numerous times, said that runners urinate in the streets almost every year,” accoring to Global Times. Organizers probably should have placed some porta potties along the route, as Area Man points out in the comments.

The Guangzhou Marathon on November 18 attracted more than 20,000 runners, the vast majority of whom ran without health complications. Two young men, however, died.

The first, Chen Jie, was a 19-year-old student at Guangdong AIB Polytechnic College from Maoming, Guangdong province (he was initially identified as 21 years old). Shortly after finishing his 10-kilometer race, he suffered cardiac arrest, and efforts to restart his heart resulted in fatal organ damage.

The second victim, 25-year-old Ding Xixiao, fell unconscious just before the finish line last Sunday in his 5-kilometer race and reportedly remained untreated for 20 minutes. This employee of a real estate company passed away earlier today, according to Xinhua via Nanfang Metropolis Daily.

South China Morning Post columnist Li Jing wrote about this on Friday:

A colleague of Ding’s, Chen Yangjie, said the runner lay on the ground untreated for 20 minutes, waiting for emergency personnel to respond.

“Ding fell down on the ground at about 8.06am, but the first ambulance only arrived at 8.27am,” Chen Yangjie told the Nanfang Daily. When an ambulance finally did arrived, it was not equipped with a respirator, he said.

Medical staff performed CPR, while they waited for a second ambulance equipped with defibrillators and respirators to arrive, Chen said. The runner was not admitted to hospital until 9.10am – an hour after his collapse.

This second tragedy has turned public attention, again, on race management and safety issues that were first brought to light last week.

Chen’s family reportedly demanded 1 million yuan in compensation after he died; Shenzhen Daily reports that organizers agreed to offer 300,000 yuan. It begs the question: why would they offer even that? Perhaps because the organization wasn’t up to snuff. Shenzhen Daily again:

A netizen called “aeleven” wrote on www.doyouhike.net that Guangzhou’s marathon wasn’t professionally held and lacked road directions and volunteers at Metro stations. Organizers provided water in 500-ml bottles along the route, the netizen said, rather than in paper cups that runners could easily discard during the race.

“It was impossible for runners to finish a bottle all at once or carry the bottle while running,” aeleven complained, adding the bottles also were a waste of plastic.

Netizens alleged that there were very little, or no, water or medical supplies offered in the second half of the marathon, and that there weren’t enough distance signs to help runners know their position or adjust their pace.

In the interest of fairness, it must be said that all runners were probably aware of the risks of long-distance running, and that heart attacks do happen, with or without marathons. But if what netziens say is true about the lack of water and signposts, we can at least conclude that Guangzhou did one heck of a shoddy job putting together such a large-scale event. No officially sanctioned event — this one recently received formal recognition from the International Association of Athletics Federations — should expose so many people to health risks.

Marathon organizers have issued a statement, but what’s glaring, as SCMP’s Li Jing points out, is what was not addressed:

Not only does that statement fail to answer the complaints about the medical response and lack of water, it also failed to promise that there would be review of the marathon’s practices before next year’s event.

Hong Kong’s Amateur Athletic Association, in contrast, responded to this year’s death of a male participant by bolstering efforts to educate runners about the health risks.

Meanwhile, the Beijing Marathon went off without a hitch this past Sunday. Note that the Beijing race is an IAAF “Gold Label” event. Perhaps there’s the difference.

This year’s Beijing Marathon had its share of hiccups. During registration, Japanese runners were initially barred, leading people to call for the race to lose its “Gold Label” accreditation from the International Association of Athletics Federations. Then, just this week, anxiety loomed over air quality, which hovered between “very unhealthy” and “hazardous.”

But when the race started, it was all about the runners, who looked like they had a great time despite the sub-freezing temperatures. Videos of the marathon have flooded Youku today, but I’ve pulled the five I thought were the most interesting to make the above compilation (on Youku after the jump for those in China; note: I might have missed something; let me know if so). One runner wore a Spider-Man outfit. One girl decided to get all weird on us. Others took photos with their children. And of course there was Gangnam Style. All told, it was a well-organized race, and no one nearly died like in Guangzhou last weekend.

If there was just one drawback, it’s that the air, according to the US Embassy, was “very hazardous” around 8 am, when the race began:

11-25-2012 08:00; PM2.5; 284.0; 334; Hazardous (at 24-hour exposure at this level)

— BeijingAir (@BeijingAir) November 25, 2012

Oh well. Can’t win em all.

Speaking of winning, Ethiopia’s Tariku Jufar Robi won the men’s race in 2:09:39, and China’s Jia Chaofeng took the gold in the women’s competition in 2:27:40.

Pictures via Xinhua

The cancellation of long-distance races at university games has highlighted the issue of declining physical fitness among college students.

–China Daily, November 12, 2012 

The first Guangzhou Marathon was held yesterday morning, with local media estimating that about 20,000 people participated. (This number should be taken with a grain of salt; in September, organizers said “it is predicted that there will be 20,000 participants in the competition”; to the best of our knowledge, Japanese runners were allowed to compete). Ethiopians, per the norm, won: Bekana Daba Tolesa, on the men’s side, ran the 26-mile race in 2:11:05, and Mulu Seboka Seyfu, on the women’s side, finished in 2:26:46; both are world-class times.

What has overshadowed these performances, however, was the fainting of two competitors, one of whom is still in critical condition at the hospital. One runner was competing in one of the shorter events, a simple five-kilometer run, when he passed out, though he later regained consciousness and will be okay. Another man, about 30 years old, passed out in the main event and had to be rushed to the hospital. His condition is described as life-threatening, though no further updates are available at this time.

According to Beijing Morning Post in an article from 11:33 am, Guangzhou Public Health Bureau’s deputy bureau chief, Tang Xiaoping, said 1,517 participants reported dizziness or discomfort after the race, but the overwhelming majority were fine. The two who fainted received prompt medical attention, he said.

UPDATE, 11/27, 12:08 pm: Two deaths: 21-year-old Chen Jie and 25-year-old Ding Xixiao.

Scenes from the marathon:

(Photo via Reuters/China Daily)