Delhi Half Marathon 2022: Olympic champion Haile Gebrselassie becomes ambassador
The Ethiopian won back-to-back gold medals in the 10,000m track event at the Atlanta 1996 and Sydney 2000 Summer Games.
Former Ethiopian long-distance runner Haile Gebrselassie, a two-time Olympic champion, was named as the international event ambassador of the Delhi Half Marathon 2022 on Thursday.
The Delhi Half Marathon is a World Athletics Elite Label Road Race. The 2022 edition will be held on October 16 and will start from Delhi’s Jawaharlal Nehru Stadium.
Half marathon world record holder Jacob Kiplimo of Uganda will headline a top-class elite field for the 17th edition of the popular event.
Haile Gebrselassie is regarded as one of the greatest long-distance runners of all time. Besides winning gold medals at both the Atlanta 1996 and Sydney 2000 Summer Games, Haile Gebrselassie is a four-time 10,000m world champion.
The Ethiopian is also a four-time world indoor championships gold medallist, a World Half Marathon winner from 2001 and has nine major marathon wins to his name.
Gebrselassie aced the Berlin Marathon four times in succession from 2006 to 2009. In 2008, the Ethiopian runner won the Berlin Marathon at the age of 35, clocking 2:03.59, a world record time back then. He achieved 17 world record times across various distances in his career spanning over two decades.
The Delhi Half Marathon will have both physical and virtual races. The physical race categories are the half marathon, Open 10K, Great Delhi Run (5 km), Senior Citizens' Run (3 km), and the Champions with Disability Run (3 km).
Ethiopia’s Amedework Walelegn, a three-time defending champion, won the men’s Delhi Half Marathon in 2020 with a course record time of 58 minutes and 53 seconds. Yalemzerf Yehualaw of Ethiopia won the women’s race in 1:04:46.
The Delhi Half Marathon was cancelled in 2021 due to the COVID-19 pandemic.