Then the weather heated up, and the 34-year-old Ethiopian
slowed down.
After running alone for most of the morning, Lemma held on
down Boylston Street to finish in 2 hours, 6 minutes, 17 seconds — the 10th
fastest time in the race’s 128-year history. Lemma dropped to the pavement and
rolled onto his back, smiling, after crossing the finish line.
“Until halfway through I was running very hard and very
good. But after that it was getting harder and harder,” said Lemma, who failed
to finish twice and came in 30th in three previous Boston attempts. “Several
times I’ve dropped out of the race before. But today I won, so I’ve redeemed
myself.”
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Hellen Obiri defended her title, outkicking Sharon Lokedi on Boylston Street to finish in 2:27:37 and win by eight seconds; two-time Boston champion Edna Kiplagat completed the Kenyan sweep, finishing another 36 seconds back.
Obiri also won New York last fall and is among the favorites
for the Paris Olympics. She is the sixth woman to win back-to-back in Boston
and the first since Catherine “the Great” Ndereba won four in six years from
2000 to ’05.
“Defending the title was not easy. Since Boston started,
it’s only six women. So I said, ‘Can I be one of them? If you want to be one of
them, you have to work extra hard,’” she said. “And I’m so happy because I’m
now one of them. I’m now in the history books in Boston.”
Lemma, the 2021 London champion, arrived in Boston with the
fastest time in the field — just the fourth person ever to break 2:02:00 when
he won in Valencia last year. And he showed it on the course Monday, separating
himself from the pack in Ashland and opening a lead of more than half of a
mile.
Lemma ran the first half in 1:00:19 — 99 seconds faster than
Geoffrey Mutai’s course record pace in 2011, when his 2:03:02 was the fastest
marathon in history. Fellow Ethiopian Mohamed Esa closed the gap through the
last few miles, finishing second by 41 seconds; two-time defending champion
Evans Chebet was third.
Each winner collected a gilded olive wreath and $150,000
from a total prize purse that topped $1 million for the first time.
On a day when sunshine and temperatures rising into the
mid-60s left the runners reaching for water — to drink, and to dump over their
heads — Obiri ran with an unusually large lead pack of 15 through Brookline
before breaking away in the final few miles.
Emma Bates of Boulder, Colorado, finished 12th — her second
straight year as the top American. Again, she found herself leading the race
through the 30-kilometer mark, slapping hands as she ran past the Wellesley
College students chanting her name before fading on the way out of Heartbreak
Hill.
“I thought last year was crazy loud, but this year surpassed
that completely,” Bates said. “It was such a nice day for the spectators. Not
so nice for the runners; it was pretty hot.”
CJ Albertson of Fresno, California, was the top American man
in seventh, his second top-10 finish.
Switzerland’s Marcel Hug righted himself after crashing into
a barrier when he took a turn too fast and still coasted to a course record in
the men’s wheelchair race. It was his seventh Boston win and his 14th straight
major marathon victory.
Hug already had a four-minute lead about 18 miles in when he
reached the landmark firehouse turn in Newton, where the course heads onto
Commonwealth Avenue on its way to Heartbreak Hill. He spilled into the fence,
flipping sideways onto his left wheel, but quickly restored himself.
“It was my fault,” Hug said. “I had too much weight, too
much pressure from above to my steering, so I couldn’t steer.”
Hug finished in 1:15:33, winning by 5:04 and breaking his
previous course record by 1:33. Britain’s Eden Rainbow-Cooper, 22, won the
women’s wheelchair race in 1:35:11 for her first major marathon victory; she is
the third-youngest woman to win the Boston wheelchair race.
The otherwise sleepy New England town of Hopkinton
celebrated its 100th anniversary as the starting line for the world’s oldest
and most prestigious marathon, sending off a field of 17 former champions and
nearly 30,000 other runners on its way. Near the finish on Boylston Street 26.2
miles (42.2 kilometers) away, officials observed the anniversary of the 2013
bombing that killed three and wounded hundreds more.
Sunny skies and minimal wind greeted the runners, with
temperatures in the 40s as they gathered in Hopkinton rising to 69 as the
stragglers crossed the finish line in the afternoon. As the field went through
Natick, the fourth of eight cities and towns on the route, athletes splashed
water on themselves to cool off.
“We couldn’t ask for a better day,” former New England
Patriots tight end Rob Gronkowski, the grand marshal, said before climbing into
an electric car that would carry him along the course. “The city of Boston
always comes out to support, no matter the event. The weather is perfection,
the energy is popping.”
The festivities began around 6 a.m., when race director Dave
McGillivray sent about 30 Massachusetts National Guard members off. Lt. Col.
Paula Reichert Karsten, one of the marchers, said she wanted to be part of a
“quintessential Massachusetts event.”
The start line was painted to say “100 years in Hopkinton,”
commemorating the 1924 move from Ashland to Hopkinton to conform to the
official Olympic Marathon distance. The announcer welcomed the gathering crowds
to the “sleepy little town of Hopkinton, 364 days of the year.”
“In Hopkinton, it’s probably the coolest thing about the
town,” said Maggie Agosto, a 16-year-old resident who went to the start line
with a friend to watch the race.
The annual race on Patriots’ Day, the state holiday that
commemorates the start of the Revolutionary War, also fell on One Boston Day,
when the city remembers the victims of the 2013 finish line bombings. Before
the race, bagpipes accompanied Gov. Maura Healey, Boston Mayor Michelle Wu and
members of the victims’ families as they laid a pair of wreaths at the sites of
the explosions. -AP