It’s very rare that anyone actually wins the big marathon held in their hometown, since usually all of those pros from Kenya come in and finish the damn thing while everyone else is still sucking wind back on mile 11 or so. But at the Venice Marathon in Italy on Sunday, an Italian guy actually won it for the first time in over 20 years.
How? Apparently all the pros from Kenya and Ethiopia accidentally made a wrong turn. The top seven runners were in a pack, and they were all following a motorcycle that took a wrong turn about 15 miles in.
And that opened the door for a 24-year-old guy named Eyob Faniel, who was born in Africa but now lives in Italy. He finished the marathon in two hours and 12 minutes, which was a full two minutes before anyone else.
That’s still a spectacular pace and would beat ANY of us by at least an hour, but it’s under the truly elite pace you’d see from Olympic marathon runners, or from some of the guys who took the wrong turn.
