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The Fastest Woman in This Year’s New York City Marathon Is Israeli


In July, when Lonah Chemtai Salpeter crossed the finish line of the world championship marathon in Eugene, Ore., in third placeAn Israeli flag was hung around her back.

Salpeter, who immigrated to Israel from Kenya, was surprised. “I am very proud to represent my country,” she said after the race.

She was praised by Prime Minister Yair Lapid. “Lonah’s will and determination is a source of pride for Israeli athletics and for the entire State of Israel,” he wrote on Twitter.

Salpeter, 33, won Israel’s fourth world championship medal and is in a gap mostly dominated by athletes representing East African countries. She’s already the first Israeli to win a major marathon, running away with a gold medal at the 2020 Tokyo Marathon. And on Sunday, she’ll be one of the favorites to win. Win the New York City Marathon, enter the race at the fastest pace. any competitor’s career marathon time.

Her road to here has not been a straight line: Salpeter has to fight for citizenship in the country where she loves her sport. And it’s certainly not a journey she or her husband, who is also her coach, could have predicted a few years ago.

In 2008, Salpeter moved to Herzliya, Israel, near Tel Aviv, to work as a nanny for a Kenyan diplomat. Jogging becomes an activity to get her out of the house after the day is over. “It’s a hobby,” she said by phone from Iten, Kenya, where she is training. “I was bored in the house so I went for a walk in the park with everyone.”

Jogging is a relative term here. She was doing a full-time and short-time job, she said, so she re-counted quickly. Running companions started to get noticed as she sped through local parks. “That’s what I really like,” she said. “There’s nothing like, ‘Someday I’ll go pro.'”

However, she still signed up for some local races, participating without formal training. In 2011, she met Dan Salpeter, an Israeli former athlete and coach who was studying physical education at an academy near Tel Aviv. A friendship turns into a romantic relationship when her Israeli visa is about to expire.

“I told myself that if he really loved me, he would probably come to me,” Salpeter said.

He did.

Together they traveled to Kenya in 2013 with the hope of returning to Israel to build a life together. Around that time, Salpeter first visited the marathon training ground in Iten, where many of Kenya’s royal runners and visiting athletes train, about 8,000 feet above sea level in the Great Valley. Rift. Dan Salpeter thinks he can develop Salpeter into a world-class athlete but not necessarily one who often stands at the top of the podium.

The couple married in 2014 and returned to Israel on visas. Salpeter became pregnant soon after. It was only after Salpeter became a mother that her training really began to succeed. Only then will she find herself on the cusp of a time that will put her in a race against the best athletes in the world. And only then did she realize that a quick path to Israeli citizenship could be found on the road to the Olympics.

If Salpeter is Jewish, her path to citizenship would be simply through the “Law of Return,” the right to automatically claim Israeli citizenship as a Jew or someone with parents or grandparents. are Jews. According to Joshua Pex, an Israeli immigration attorney, the spouse of an Israeli citizen can get a work and temporary visa, but the path to citizenship can take four to seven years.

If Salpeter qualifies for the Olympics in the marathon, finishing in under 2 hours and 45 minutes, surely her naturalization process will be sped up, she thought.

The couple had been to a Home Office office a few months earlier, and “the staff there was very tough on her,” Dan Salpeter said. “It makes the process very intolerable.” But if Salpeter can run fast, she thought, surely some documents can also be processed faster.

“I said to myself, ‘Give it a chance. If you have standards then things are easier,” recalls Salpeter. In February 2016, Salpeter won the Tel Aviv Marathon with a time of 2:40:16, almost five minutes ahead of the qualifying time for the Rio Olympics.

This is an athlete, married to an Israeli man, who could represent Israel at the Olympics in the next few months.

She returned to the internal affairs office being covered by a mob of media. “Suddenly, it was like a celebrity coming into the office,” says Dan Salpeter. “Everybody is happy and wants to get a picture of her.”

The slow shuffling of the bureaucracy grew rapidly to match Salpeter’s executive record.

“It’s rare for a normal couple,” Pex said. “They will never expedite the process.” However, the Interior Ministry can expedite applicants who make “meaningful contributions to Israel’s culture, society and security”, he said.

Salpeter has since represented Israel in major marathons and track encounters around the world. She represented Israel at the 2016 Olympics, but she dropped out of the race because of shoulder problems due to breastfeeding. She won the 10,000 meters at the 2018 European Championships, and won the Florence Marathon the same year. She won the Prague Marathon in 2019 and was in the lead group of the Olympic Marathon in Japan last summer with less than 5km to go but fell back due to stomach pain. terrible. (“You are a woman, you get it,” she told a reporter, closing her eyes to emphasize the pain.)

Acceptance isn’t always easy, though. While she declined to directly address the face of racism in Israel, Salpeter did not always have popular support as an East African immigrant. But when she wins, she makes it clear: she’s a star.

“People say to me, ‘You inspire us, you make us proud,’ so that really motivates me a lot,” says Salpeter. in Israel. Running like this is possible.”

Despite having the fastest career marathon time of any of the competitors that will line up on Staten Island on Sunday, Salpeter hasn’t attracted as much attention as some of the other favorites, including Mr. Kenya Hellen Obiri, two-time Olympic medalist and seven-time individual world medalist. – medalist who is set to run her first marathon in New York. The city is plastered with ads asking New Yorkers: “Haven’t you heard of Hellen Obiri? You will.” No pressure.

Salpeter and Obiri will join Gotytom Gebreslase of Ethiopia, winner of this year’s world championship marathon, and Edna Kiplagat of Kenya, 2010 New York City Marathon winner, who at the age of 42 has shows no signs of slowing down after coming in second at last year’s Boston Marathon. (The winner of that race, Diana Kipyokei, was disqualified after testing positive for drugs. Kiplagat will be named the winner if Kipyokei’s suspension is completed.)

“The field is not so easy,” Salpeter said. “You came to challenge yourself in New York City.”

When she was asked about her goals for the race, her answer was straightforward. “To win,” she said, as if she had been asked if the sky was blue. “Everybody wants to win.”

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