by Stuart Weir
This is a fun story, watching it develop was exciting as well on day 2. Thanks Stuart Weir for writing this one! Missing you in Tokyo, my friend!
An unexpected Marathon medal!
The results of the Women’s marathon were:
1 Peres Jepchirchir (Kenya) 2:24:43
2 Tigst Assefs (Ethiopia) 2:24:45
3 Julia Paternain (Uruguay) 2:25:23
Two East Africans, OK. But a Uruguayan? Everyone has been scrambling around to discover who she is. Her own self-description is: “I live in the States, but I grew up in England. My accent is a little confusing. My whole family is from Uruguay. I speak Spanish and English”. It was Uruguay’s first-ever medal at the World Champs.
I read on Twitter:
- She has three passports and a green card.
- She was born in Mexico.
- Her whole family is from Uruguay, where most of them reside, except for her, her mother, and her father.
- She moved to England when she was 2 years old.
- She ran in the NCAA at Penn State for two years before transferring to Arkansas during the pandemic. She competed for the Razorbacks for three years.
She said after the race: “My family back in Uruguay were all sending me messages, cheering for me. The Federation is great. Uruguay is a small country, but its people take great pride in their nation. And I’m very grateful. And I really enjoyed running for Uruguay. Towards the end of that race, when it got hot, I was thinking about Uruguay and running each of those miles for Uruguay”.
To win a world medal in her second Marathon, It left her almost speechless: “I cannot believe it. I am in shock. Complete shock. In the race, I wasn’t really thinking about a time out there. I was trying to race. This was very different from the first marathon I ran, which was in perfect conditions and consisted of a three-mile flat loop. So very different from this. However, this was a truly exceptional experience. The crowd out there was absolutely amazing. It’s tough, but a great experience. And I am very grateful to everyone who helped me get here.
“Everyone that I train with knows that I like running alone. When things get hard, I like being in my own little planet and running my own race. I actually think that today worked to my advantage. My coach helped me create a plan, saying, ‘Run your own race and hopefully if we run smart, people will come back to us as the race progresses.’ And that’s exactly what happened. So I think that was the perfect strategy. So I think he really planned that great, and I just had to go out there and execute, and yeah”.
Because of the way she ran her race, she had to be told she had won a medal. She did not know how many people were in front of her!
She got support from Eilish McColgan, who tweeted: “This is the perfect example as to why federations should take rankings! A PB of 2.27 and the last ranking spot. Had she not switched nationality from GB to Uruguay earlier this year – she’d be watching these champs on TV… Instead, she comes away with a WORLD MEDAL!!”
Given that she had lived in England, people were posting on social media connections with various UK events, like:
She competed at the English Schools
She ran for Great Britain at the European U23 Championships
The first time someone who has raced at the Southern Road Relays in Crystal Palace has won a World Championships marathon medal!
A lovely human story!
