Womens Marathon at Berlin World Championships 2009: Xue Bai wins

Bestsellers

Garmin FR 410
Garmin FR 405CX
MOTOACTV
Garmin FR 405
Nike+ GPS
Garmin FR 305
Garmin FR 405
Garmin FR 910XT

Sharebar

As results come in from the Womens marathon at the World Athletics Championships at Berlin, it looks like China has come out on tops overall with some great finishes to take up the team world cup, while Japan and Russia came second and third respectively.

It was Xue Bai who won the event, with a time of 2:25:15, and topped a strong performance from China, with as many as 4 Chinese in the top-13 results. It was quite a close finish, unlike the Mens marathon yesterday, with runner up Yoshimi Ozaki from Japan just 2:25:25 giving Xue a fight all the way. Aselefech Mergia from Ethiopia was third not too far behind in 2:25:32, and was infact leading T THE 40KM point of the race.

Interestingly, as many as 24 runners were bunched together at the half-way point, which was reached in 1:13:39, which included the other fancied runners Dire Tune and Bezunesh Bekele from Ethiopia. The much fancied Kara Goucher from the US was a dissapointing 10th placed in 2:27:48

Overall Results:

Xue Bai CHN 2:25:15 (SB)
Yoshimi Ozaki JPN 2:25:25 (SB)
Aselefech Mergia ETH 2:25:32
Chunxiu Zhou CHN 2:25:39 (SB)
Xiaolin Zhu CHN 2:26:08 (SB)
Marisa Barros POR 2:26:50
Yuri Kano JPN 2:26:57 (SB)
Nailiya Yulamanova RUS 2:27:08
Alevtina Biktimirova RUS 2:27:39 (SB)
Kara Goucher USA 2:27:48 (SB)

Some interesting statistics from twitter world from Danny Naylor on the event:

Top three teams from Asia (China, Japan, Russia), 4 of top 5 individuals including gold and silver, 7 of top 9
The #2 American beat the #2 Ethiopian and the #1 Kenyan. How about that? this was definitely a race of Asian dominance…including Russia
71 starters, 60 finishers
Ethiopia has never won any medal in the event at Worlds, China’s never gotten gold

Results from berlin.iaaf.org

More coverage from Berlin World Championships: