Tigst Assefa: Remember the Name!  

By Shlomo Maital

     Comedian Rodney Dangerfield had a running theme:  “I can’t get no respect.”  Often I feel women athletes have the same theme.  

     Take the Ethiopian marathon runner Tigst Assefa.  She just broke the world record for the marathon, completing the Berlin marathon in an astounding 2 hours 11 minutes 53 seconds.  That means she ran 26.2 miles in an average time of 5 minutes and 3 seconds per mile.  She knocked a full two minutes off the previous record.  Yet attention to this feat in the media was sparse, to say the least.   

      Running a mile in five minutes, or a kilometer in 3 minutes, means running 100 meters in 18 seconds, and doing this 420 times!  What an athlete!   What is most amazing, is that Tigst’s stellar event was 800 meters!  She has moved up from 800 meters, to 42,000 meters!  

      Tigst’s time is faster than the best of Ethiopian male long-distance runners, Abebe Bikila, the first African to win a gold medal at the Olympic Games, two-time Olympic champion of this event at Rome 1960 and Tokyo 1964, and the first Ethiopian world record holder.  She ran the second half-marathon much faster than the first half, picking up her pace to smash the world record. 

      The men’s marathon record is now held by the legendary Kenyan,  Eliud Kipchoge, considered to be the greatest marathoner ever. He won Berlin for the fifth time in his career, hanging on to win 2:02:42.  He set the men’s world record in Berlin in 2022 with a time of 2:01:09. 

        In athletics, most elite women perform about 10% or more, worse than men.  Tigst Assefa’s record is just 9% below Kipchoge’s record. 

         Israel’s female marathon runner Lonah Korlima Chemtai Salpeter won the bronze medal at the 2022 World Athletics Championships.  She got very little acclaim or media attention.  Alas.

         I ran two marathons in my life:  New York, 1985, in under four hours. I undertrained, didn’t bother drinking at all during the race, and ended up limping the last few miles with a terrible leg cramp and leaning on the finisher ahead of me when I felt faint.  In Boston, 2006, it took me over five hours.  But hey, I was 64.

     Finishing a 26-mile run or jog is hard.  Thousands do it.  For me, it taught me a life lesson – if you persist through pain and suffering, you can achieve good things. 

      Thanks, New York and Boston.  And especially – Thanks Tigst!  You deserve a front-page headline.