Carolina Robles, the Sevillian who has forged herself this summer in the Dehesa Doña María surfing heat waves, dreamed of a medal – actually, two, individual and team – for 35 kilometers. The gold was claimed by the Finnish Alisa Vainio from the start, when she decided to go solo on a five-kilometer circuit, a succession of hills, which they did eight laps of. She did not falter for a moment and advanced like a metronome without caring about anything else. Only a moment of discomfort, when the boys came from behind – they started 40 minutes later – and overtook her without caring about pushing her wide on the curves.
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Vainio, already with 19 marathons under her belt at only 28 years old, dominated and crossed the finish line with a new championship record (2h 22m 26s). Behind her, Robles ended up suffering the toughness of the course, but solidly defended her finalist position (she finished eighth with a time of 2h 28m 7s), an extraordinary result for someone facing this distance for the second time and left with the best time by a Spanish woman in a European Championship. Antonio Serrano’s student led a Spanish team that won the bronze medal in alliance with Fátima Ouhaddou (fifteenth), Ester Navarrete (18th), and Txell Soler (20th). The other favorite, the German Amanal Petros, last summer’s world runner-up in Tokyo, took the men’s victory. Spain finished fourth.
These worldly problems did not affect Vainio. She has never been afraid of the 42.195 kilometers. The runner from Lappeeranta, a city located 30 kilometers from Russia, where she lives on the shores of Lake Saimaa, the fourth largest in Europe, debuted in the marathon at 17 years old. Since then, 19 marathons, six of them in the last 11 months. Last year she achieved fifth place at the Tokyo World Championships, won the Finnish Championship, was fourth in Valencia, triumphed in Seville, and was sixth in Paris before being crowned European champion.
The Finnish athlete won in Birmingham on a cool and pleasant morning, with low humidity, with the largest margin ever achieved in a European Championship: she beat Hungarian Lili Anna Vindics-Tóth by four minutes and 55 seconds – Portuguese Rosa Mota beat Laura Flogi by 4m 4s in Stuttgart 1986 -, bronze ahead of Abbie Donnelly, the first British woman to win a marathon medal. Vainio and her bouncing braids saw no rival in 42 kilometers. As soon as she got up, she looked for the 10,000m final from the previous night and got motivated watching her idol, the Swede Andreas Almgren, dominate. The inspiration she lacked before her monologue in Birmingham.
Robles lost track of her on the first climb. Then she fought for 30 kilometers with the contenders for the other two medals. “It has been very tough,” exclaimed the Andalusian at the finish line. “I tried to guide myself by the sensations but it was a race with constant pace changes, very hard. I dreamed of the medal. I had it there, but the rivals had a bit more strength. It was a very hard war. I wanted to start more reserved, but Antonio (Serrano, her coach) told me to take risks, to go ahead. On the last lap I had a hard time, but more because of the blister than the suffering of the race.”
Carlos Mayo also arrived limping at the finish line after twisting on a last climb with a 6% gradient. The Aragonese, a pupil of Juan del Campo, was much more cautious than Robles and passed kilometer 10 in 34th place, but then started to recover and finished fifteenth, just behind the best Spaniard, Jorge González, the efficient marathoner from Extremadura who always competes well and who risked from the start to go out alongside Petros, Fitwi, Ringer, Riva… In the end, Petros, born in Eritrea and who arrived in Germany as a refugee in 2012, won. The athlete left behind his mother and sisters, who disappeared in the Tigray region of Ethiopia. He now dedicates every success to his mother, who lives in a village without electricity or internet.
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