Ethiopians seal Tokyo Marathon double

Runners start the race during the Tokyo Marathon

Runners start the race during the Tokyo Marathon

Endeshaw Negesse and Birhane Dibaba claimed a double win for Ethiopia at the Tokyo Marathon yesterday amid tight security in Japan’s capital. Negesse won the men’s race in 2 hours and 6 minutes, followed by Stephen Kiprotich of Uganda and Kenya’s Dickson Chumba, who took top spot last year. In the women’s event, Dibaba went one better than her runner-up position in 2014.
About 36,000 runners took to Tokyo’s streets for the first of the World Marathon Majors on a rainy morning in temperatures about 6 degrees Celsius. The other five majors are in Boston, London, Berlin, Chicago and New York.
Organizers deployed more than 10,000 security officials, according to the Yomiuri newspaper. Some 64 on-duty police officers ran as part of the event’s surveillance, according to the paper.
The heightened security comes after bombings at the Boston Marathon in 2013 and amid increased concern about terrorism in Japan following the murder this year of two Japanese who had been taken hostage by Islamic State. Bloomberg

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