Female marathon runners were rushed for medical attention, faces contorted in pain, while other competitors hobbled off the track in the inaugural road race of Doha’s World Athletics Championships in the early hours of yesterday.
Humidity of more than 73 percent and temperatures of almost 33°C dogged the race, specially started at midnight to avoid peak heat, as it meandered along a course on Doha’s Al Corniche Street.
“You see somebody down on the course and it’s just, extremely grounding and scary,” said Canada’s Lyndsay Tessier, 41, who finished ninth. “That could be you in the next kilometer, the next 500 meters.”
Photo: EPA-EFE
“It was just really scary and intimidating and daunting. So that was enough to hold me back,” Tessier said.
About two dozen runners in the 68-strong marathon field fell by the wayside as the sweltering conditions took their toll, in a sport which rarely sees drop-outs at this level.
Kenya’s Ruth Chepngetich won gold when she took the tape after 2 hours, 32 minutes, 43 seconds, crediting “training in a hot area” of her home country for helping her to tame the elements.
Tessier’s fellow competitors filed behind her as she spoke to the media, some held up by their coaches and others too exhausted to stop and speak.
“I’m just really grateful to have finished standing up,” Tessier said.
Organizers told race participants that the event’s timing could be changed if conditions proved prohibitive, but ultimately pressed ahead with the original plan.
Almost all of the runners were saturated with sweat by the halfway point and most ran with bottles, while some video cameras being used to film the race malfunctioned because of the conditions.
A mild breeze that lapped the corniche during the opening ceremony and fireworks display had dwindled by the end of the race leaving the runners to bear the brunt of the surging humidity.
Marathon runners and walkers do not have the luxury of competing at the championships’ principal venue, the air-conditioned Khalifa Stadium, where the climate is maintained at 23°C to 25°C, although Braima Suncar Dabo stopped running in the men’s 5,000m there on Friday to help a struggling competitor finish.
Dabo held up an exhausted Jonathan Busby and together they staggered around the last turn and over the finish line to great applause, even though the other runners had crossed five minutes earlier.
Busby, from Aruba, collapsed onto the track and was placed in a wheelchair by medical staff.
“Any athlete in that situation would do the same thing,” Guinea-Bissau’s Dabo said through a translator. “It was something normal to do, to help someone from another country, because [Busby] was representing his country as well.”
Officially, Busby was disqualified, but the crowd roared for him and Dabo as they crossed the line.
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