Paris Held a ‘Marathon for All’ for Amateur Runners That Followed the Iconic Official Race Route

The night earlier than the females’s marathon on the 2024 Paris Games, whereas the Olympic racers slept, a unconditionally assorted competitors lit up town streets—and no-one had to be a world-class athlete to raise shut half.

In the Marathon Pour Tous (which translates to the Marathon for All in English), 20,024 remarkable runners careened thru the identical iconic direction—and crossed the identical cease line—as Sifan Hassan and Tola Tamirat, the respective females’s and men’s marathon gold medalists. For those that wished to apply in those iconic Olympians’ footsteps, goal not all 26.2 miles of them, a simultaneous 10-kilometer (a.k.a. 6.2-mile) bound used to be also held in central Paris. In total, bigger than 40,000 of us from 127 international locations participated in the two events, in step with the Associated Press. Both events were held overnight forward of the females’s marathon on August 11th.

Because the legit web sites of the 2024 Games notes, right here is the principle time an Olympic marathon route has been opened to the public. It used to be allotment of the Worldwide Olympic Committee’s (IOC) effort to assemble guests truly feel like they were allotment of the action and provides them “unforgettable, lifelong” recollections from this year’s Games.

Making it rather more special? The direction, for each and every Olympians and amateurs, used to be designed to highlight key moments in French historical past. The beginning gun went off on the Hôtel de Ville, the place the Females’s March on Versailles came about in 1789. Runners then traveled thru 9 districts of Paris, weaving past iconic landmarks like the Eiffel Tower, the Louvre, and the Palace of Versailles earlier than crossing the cease line on the Esplanade des Invalides.