By CapitalEritrea,
ERITREA’s Ghirmay Ghebreselassie won the Göteborgsvavet Half Marathon 2014 in Gothenburg, Sweden on Saturday after finishing third place during the same event in 2013.
Shortly after the race everyone thought Ghebreselassie had set a new track record by three seconds, but this proved wrong after officials announced that the time was taken incorrectly due to a technical error.
“I have no precise explanation. There was a technical problem at the start of the race impacting the elite group only. All other runners got the real times. We have manual backup times and when we checked them we realized that they were not consistent and did not match.”, said Per Crona, Course Director of the competition.
Nonetheless, the 18-year-old has set a record as the youngest winner in the history of the Gothenburg marathon winning 19 seconds ahead of Kenyan rival Richard Mengich.
Ghebresleassie said his winning recipe was that he drank nothing before the race and just ate bread for breakfast.
GöteborgsVarvet Half Marathon is a classic 21km race with 48 202 runners from 48 nations participating this year.
The race winner takes home an official price money of $15,000.
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