LONDON (Reuters) – Paralympic women’s 100 metres champion Sammi Kinghorn will make her London Marathon debut in April, her first race over the gruelling distance in seven years.
The 29-year-old is Britain’s fastest wheelchair racer in history over every distance from 100 to 800m, and recorded the biggest victory of her career when she won gold in the 100m at last year’s Paralympics in Paris.
Kinghorn has not raced the 42.195km marathon since the 2018 Commonwealth Games, where she finished fourth.
“I’m doing this as a challenge for myself and to enjoy the experience of racing in front of a home crowd,” she said. “I’m not putting any pressure on myself to finish in a particular place, just to push myself to see how well I can do.”
Kinghorn joins a women’s wheelchair field for the April 27 event that features Paris Paralympics marathon champion Catherine Debrunner, multiple London marathon winner Manuela Schaer and Britain’s top-ranked marathon racer Eden Rainbow-Cooper. (This story has been refiled to change the prefix to ‘Athletics,’ not ‘Soccer,’ in the headline)
(Reporting by Lori Ewing; Editing by Christian Radnedge)
