Marathon, Women

The race started in a downpour that lasted for the first half of the race, only to see the sun break through and shine on the runners in the final half. The pre-race favorite was Kenyan Mary Keitany, who had won the London Marathon in April, but her teammates, Edna Kiplagat and Priscah Jeptoo were expected to challenge, having placed 1-2 at the 2011 World Championships. The Kenyan team was so strong that they had swept the medals at Daegu, and third-place finisher Sharon Cherop was not even selected for the Olympic team.

The race started slowly in the rain, and at the halfway point 28 runners remained together. At 25 km Kiplagat made the first serious attack, dropping all but her teammates and the three Ethiopians, led by Tiki Gelana, who had won the Rotterdam Marathon in April in 2-18:58 and won at Amsterdam in October 2011. Russian Tatyana Arkhipova bridged to the leaders at 32 km, and by 35 km, only four were left in the main pack to contest the medals – Keitany, Jeptoo, Gelana, and Arkhipova. Keitany attempted a surge on The Embankment, similar to the one that had won her the London Marathon, but nobody budged. The four went through 40 km together and Gelana then attacked, with only Jeptoo able to respond. Gelana quickly opened about 20 metres on Jeptoo but that margin stayed intact through the finish line, as Jeptoo could not close, and Gelana could not open further, winning the gold medal by five seconds. Behind them Keitany was spent and would drop to fourth, as Arkhipova won bronze.

That was how the event and the results seemed to have ended. In 2015, however, the IOC began re-testing samples from the 2008 Beijing and 2012 London Olympics, using newer, more advanced testing techniques, in an effort to find those who had used performance enhancing drugs (PEDs), but in whom it could not be detected at the time of those Olympics. This was one of the many events affected.

With re-testing, six athletes would later be disqualified in this event, although the medalists were not implicated. The highest finisher to be DQed was Ukrainian Tetiana Hamera-Shmyrko, who originally finished fifth. Also disqualified were China’s Wang Jiali (58th), two athletes from Turkey – Bahar Doğan (62nd) and Ümmü Kiraz (88th), and two athletes who did not finish – Colombian Yolanda Caballero and Russian Liliya Shobukhova.