News Archive

Wednesday 3 November 2004 New York, USA - Usually, its the Olympic also-rans

who come to the ING New York City Marathon hoping to show the world that their

performance at the Games a couple of months earlier was just an off day.

Paula Radcliffe

Everyone knows, of course, that Paula Radcliffe hopes to do just that this

coming Sunday (7 Nov), and almost certainly there will be others. But there

will also be at least a couple of Olympic marathon medallists toeing the line

among the 30,000-plus expected to start on Sunday morning.

Second marathon in 77 days

One of them is 31-year-old Deena Kastor, the American bronze medallist in the

Athens womens Marathon, who will be tackling her second marathon in 77 days and

her third in seven months. Sundays race will undoubtedly be the biggest payday

of her running career - but that wasn the determining factor, because at the

start of the year she had announced her intention to run all three.

Her motivation essentially is, "The Kenyans do it, so why can

I?"

"It was her choice at the start of the year to run these three

races," says Joe Vigil, who has been her coach since 1997. "She knew

it would be tough, but she wanted to try it. She said all the Kenyans would be

there in New York, so she thought shed like to try." ...