New Delhi: World half marathon record holder Kenya’s Joyciline Jepkosgei will go head-to-head with three-time Olympic gold medallist Tirunesh Dibaba in the women’s elite field for the Airtel Delhi Half Marathon.
Jepkosgei will come to the October 21 event buoyed by a half marathon win in her native Kenya last Sunday.
Jepkosgei and Dibaba have met twice before, first at last year’s Ras al Khaimah Hal Marathon when Jepkosgei finished third and the Ethiopian legend was fifth.
Their second showdown was in May this year at the Manchester 10km in Great Britain when Dibaba got the upper hand with a convincing win (31:08 to 31:57), pushing the Kenyan to the second place.
Dibaba’s participation in the ADHM has been announced earlier. “The Airtel Delhi Half Marathon is my first-ever trip to India and so I am very much looking forward to visiting and also competing against, once again, Tirunesh Dibaba as well as the rest of the field of accomplished and confident women,” said the 24-year-old Jepkosgei in a release.
Jepkosgei grabbed international attention on several occasions during 2017. She set a world half marathon best of 64:52 in Prague in April last year and improved that mark by one second to 64:51 in the Spanish city of Valencia 12 months ago.
In between these two record-breaking half marathon outings, Jepkosgei also became the first woman to run under 30 minutes for 10km on the roads when she he ran a world record of 29:43 on her return to the Czech capital Prague in September 2017.
This year has seen Jepkosgei compete in her first global championship and she returned to Valencia almost five months after her world record in the same city and placed second at the IAAF World Half Marathon Championships in March.
Jepkosgei is still looking for her first international win of 2018 and that will provide her with extra motivation in Delhi.
