Sisay Lemma of Ethiopia set a blistering pace and held on to win the Boston Marathon on Monday, running alone through most of the course to finish in 2 hours, 6 minutes, 17 seconds — the 10th fastest time in the race's 128-year history.
Shortly afterward, Hellen Obiri repeated as Boston Marathon champion. The Kenyan is the first woman to win back-to-back since 2005.
Lemma scorched the first half of the course, setting a record pace to build a lead of more than half of a mile. Then the weather heated up, and the 34-year-old Ethiopian slowed down.
After running alone for most of the morning, Lemma held on down Boylston Street to finish in 2 hours, 6 minutes, 17 seconds — the 10th fastest time in the race's 128-year history.
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“I decided that I wanted to start fast early,” said Lemma, who dropped to the pavement and rolled onto his back, smiling, after crossing the finish line. “I kept the pace and I won.”
The 2024 Boston Marathon in photos
Lemma, the 2021 London champion, arrived in Boston with the fastest time in the field — just the fourth person ever to break 2:02:00 when he won in Valencia last year. And he showed it on the course Monday, separating himself from the pack in Ashland and opening a lead of more than half of a mile.
Lemma ran the first half in 1:00:19 — 99 seconds faster than Geoffrey Mutai's course record pace in 2011, when he finished in 2:03:02 — the fastest marathon in history to that point. Fellow Ethiopian Mohamed Esa closed the gap through the last few miles, finishing second by 41 seconds; two-time defending champion Evans Chebet was third.
On a day when sunshine and temperatures rising into the mid-60s left the runners reaching for water — to drink, and to dump over their heads — Obiri ran with an unusually large lead pack of 15 through Brookline before breaking away in the final few miles.
Obiri also won New York last year, and is one of the favorites heading into the Paris Olympics. She said she told herself: “I’m not giving up. I’m not going to let this one go.”
Emma Bates of Boulder, Colorado, finished 12th — her second straight year as the top American. CJ Albertson of Fresno, California, was seventh, his second top 10 finish.
Switzerland's Marcel Hug righted himself after crashing into a barrier when he took a turn too fast and still coasted to a course record in the men's wheelchair race. It was his seventh Boston win and his 14th straight major marathon victory.
Hug already had a four-minute lead about 18 miles in when reached the landmark firehouse turn in Newton, where the course heads onto Commonwealth Avenue on its way to Heartbreak Hill. He spilled into the fence, flipping sideways onto his left wheel, but quickly restored himself.
“It was my fault,” Hug said. “I had too much weight, too much pressure from above to my steering, so I couldn’t steer.”
Hug finished in 1:15:33, winning by 5:04 and breaking his previous course record by 1:33. Britain's Eden Rainbow-Cooper, 22, won the women's wheelchair race in 1:35:11 for her first major marathon victory; she is the third-youngest woman to win the Boston wheelchair race.
Plenty of runners were still out on the course and waves and waves of other athletes, over 30,000 in total, were taking part in the famed race.
See live results on the Boston Athletic Association's Boston Marathon results page.
Tens of thousands of runners hitched a ride to the starting line Monday morning, loading up on buses at the Boston Common to head to Hopkinton, where they began their 26.2 mile journey to the finish line on Boylston Street.
People flew in from all over the world and were running for various charities. There were over 30,000 official participants, including runners from 129 countries and all 50 U.S. states.
The finish line was buzzing with people Sunday warming up and getting excited for the race. That includes Kit John from Los Angeles, who ran the Boston Athletic Association's two-and-a-half mile Shake Out Run.
"I'm not going to lie, today I'm feeling, you know, the butterflies are kicking in. I'm not going to sit here and lie to you guys. This is real. Like the past week, I was like I've done this before — blah, blah, blah. But when you actually come down and see people actually running before the race, you get the jitters. I don't care who you are. Kit has the jitters right now," said Kit John, runner from Los Angeles.
The first wave of people are expected to load up on buses at about 6:45 a.m.
