Surpassing her fellow Kenyan teammate and four-time New York City Marathon Champion Mary Keitany, Joyciline Jepkosgei was crowned the champion of the New York City Marathon this past weekend. Although this was her first marathon debut, she previously won a half marathon in Valencia, Spain, with a time of 1:04:51. That time, helped her set the new world record back in 2017. Thus, she was just seven seconds shy of breaking this NYC Marathon record. Her tenacity and endurance throughout the race helped push her above the competition and she was able to come out victorious.
A clean sweep, as this marathon was referred to, resulted in a New York City marathon win for both a Kenyan man (Geoffrey Kamworor) and a Kenyan woman. Considering that this is one of the world’s largest marathons, Jepkosgei set the bar and level of this competition in a very special way. In fact, in lieu of the 2020 Olympic games approaching next summer, this gave Jepkosgei a slight advantage in vying for a position on the Kenyan national team. However, when looking at Jepkosgei’s background as a long-distance runner (10,000 meters), before this NYC marathon, she only competed and primarily ran in races that were half-marathons. In a recent article by Daily Nation, Jepkosgei mentioned, “My goal was just to finish the race because I was competing against world beaters”. Nevertheless, while the goal was just to finish the race, Jepkosgei did more than that by winning one of the most notable marathons in the entire world.