Marathon, Men

The 1992 men’s Olympic marathon was very wide open as nobody had dominated the event in the preceding years. The Barcelona course was point-to-point, starting in Mataró, northeast of Barcelona, and finishing in the Olympic Stadium. The route followed the seacoast for the early part of the race. But the finish was brutal, ascending Montjuic, a small mountain in Barcelona where the Olympic Stadium was located. The rise was about 150 metres (480 feet), and came at the end of 42+ kilometers (26+ miles) of running.

The race started at 6:30 PM, but it was a bright, sunny day, with temperatures approaching 27° C. (80° F.). Because of the heat the pace was slow and the pack stayed together, with 30 runners still leading thru 20 km. The defending champion, Gelindo Bordin, was in that group, but dropped out shortly thereafter with a groin strain. By 30 km. the race had come down to a group of five – Kim Wan-Gi and Hwang Yeong-Jo, both of Korea, Koichi Morishita and Takeyuki Nakayama of Japan, and Germany’s Stephan Freigang. This group would constitute the top four places, with Kim Wang-Gi dropping back eventually and finishing 28th. By 35 km. Hwang and Morishita had separated themselves and together to the base of Montjuic. Up the mountain, Hwang slowly pulled ahead and entered the stadium in the lead. He held on to win the gold medal, Morishita in second, 22 seconds back, and Freigang earning a bronze medal. The winning time, 2-13:23, was the slowest since 1968, and on a sea-level course, since Abebe Bikila’s win in Roma in 1960.

The men’s marathon finished just before the start of the Closing Ceremony. Because of the late start for the race, any runners finishing after 2-45, or at about 9:15 PM, could not finish in the main stadium, and the final runners to finish the race were re-directed to an alternate finish line on the warm-up track outside the Olympic Stadium.