The sunny streets of Seville, Spain, suit the Tricolores perfectly. Morhad Amdouni and Méline Rollin established new French marathon records there, Sunday February 18.
At 35, the first lowered his own mark, completing the event in 2:03:47. He finishes 2e of the distance among men, behind the Ethiopian Deresa Geleta Sulfata (2 h 03 min 27 s). The native of Porto-Vecchio, in Corsica, had held the national reference since 2022 and the Paris marathon, which he finished in 2 h 05 min 22 s. This Sunday, he even came close to the European record – 2:03:36 – set by Belgian Bashir Abdi in 2021 in Rotterdam (Netherlands).
A few minutes later, Méline Rollin crossed the finish line in 2 h 24 min 12 s, erasing Christelle Daunay, record holder since 2010 (2 h 24 min 22 s). The 25-year-old runner ranks 7e of the event, won by the Ethiopian Azmera Gebru (2 h 22 min 13 s).
Tribute to Kelvin Kiptum
Fourth Frenchman in the Valencia marathon (Spain), at the beginning of December 2023, Morhad Amdouni was not at the top of the list for the Olympic selection and he knew that he had to achieve a good performance in Seville, if he wanted to continue dreaming Games in Paris. Méline Rollin, for her part, was not yet qualified.
Less than six months before the opening ceremony, ten athletes – five men and five women – have already achieved the minimums required by World Athletics. The others have until April 30 to do so, but only three will compete in the Olympics in each category.
Thanks to their good times achieved earlier in the winter, Mehdi Frère and Nicolas Navarro among the men, as well as Mekdes Woldu and Mélody Julien among the women, seem to have priority at this stage, according to the selection procedures of the French Federation.
At the end of Sunday’s race, Morhad Amdouni and Méline Rollin are well on their way to completing the group.
Furthermore, before the start of the Seville marathon, a tribute was paid to the Kenyan Kelvin Kiptum, world record holder for the event, killed with his trainer in a car accident, six days earlier. He was 24 years old. On October 8, 2023 in Chicago, Illinois (United States), Kelvin Kiptum approached the symbolic two-hour mark (2:00:35 a.m.), beating to everyone’s surprise by almost a minute. the time of his compatriot, the legend Eliud Kipchoge (2 h 01 min 09 s, in Berlin in 2022).