“I couldn’t have asked to be back as strong as I am right now, but every day I love what I do,” Scaroni said.
The unseasonably high temperatures — in the low 70s — played a factor in both races, said Fearnley, who was providing commentary on ESPN. The warmer weather, he said, helped the wheelchair racers create friction between their gloves and the outside of the wheels that they flick at. The lack of a significant breeze also helped the racers at the start and on the bridges.
Romanchuk, who finished second, also broke Fearnley’s course record, finishing in 1 hour 27 minutes 38 seconds.
Hug, though, was the undisputed winner. He won the race in 2013, 2016, 2017 and 2021, and finished one second behind Romanchuk in 2019. He won five of the six World Marathon Majors races last year, and Sunday’s victory gives him five again this year. Hug also won four gold medals at the Tokyo Paralympics, including a second gold medal in the marathon.
Scaroni, 31, has been on the podium 15 times in World Marathon Majors races, and now has won two of them.
A month after winning two medals in the Tokyo Paralympic Games last year, she collided with a car on the roads in Illinois and fractured a vertebra. In June, in her first race back, she won the Mini 10K in a world-record time, then broke the 5,000-meter world record on the track.
Scaroni, who grew up in Tekoa, Wash., and attended the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, finished third in the New York City Marathon in 2019.
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