If you ever feel bad about taking a longer time than someone else to accomplish the same things, just remember that during the 1912 Stockholm Olympics Japanese marathon runner Shizo Kanakuri passed out in a garden party along the marathon route and, instead of notifying race officials of his inability to finish the race, he went back to Japan without telling anyone and was considered a missing person by the Swedish authorities for 50 years.
He didn’t finish the race until 1967 when a Swedish television station offered to help him complete the run, and he finished with a final time of 54 years, 8 months, 6 days, 5 hours, 32 minutes and 20.379 seconds.
This post needs the picture of the man finally crossing the finish line.
“Make sure to stay healthy. We should definitely meet up again.”
“Take care and see you someday.”
It was around 7:40 am on Feb. 26, and the welcome center in front of the Olympic athletes’ village in Gangneung was awash in tears. The bus was just 20 meters away, but it took the North Korean players on the unified women’s ice hockey team ten minutes to reach it. The South Korean athletes who had come to see them off embraced them tightly and would not let go. Team coach Sarah Murray and North Korean coach Pak Chol-ho also shared a tearful embrace. As they boarded the bus, the North Korean players opened the windows and reached their arms out to ease the pain of their goodbye.
“Who makes athletes cry? It’s just heartbreaking,” a Korea Ice Hockey Association (KIHA) official said.
On Feb. 23 and 24, the Hankyoreh visited Murray and the South Korean athletes at the Korea House in Gangneung’s Olympic Park to hear their fond memories of 33 days as a unified team.
When the 12 North Korean players first joined them at the Jincheon athletes’ village in North Chungcheong Province on Jan. 25, few truly understood how “peace” would become the 2018 Pyeongchang Olympics’ greatest legacy.
“The unified team was put together two weeks ahead of the Olympics, so there was a lot of concern,” Murray recalled.
But the unified Korean team proved the key driving force behind the Olympics’ success. The International Olympic Committee (IOC), which emphasizes the legacy of individual Olympics events, is certain to remember the Pyeongchang event as a “peace Olympics.” The puck used to score the team’s first goal in a Group B match against Japan is to be enshrined in the International Ice Hockey Federation (IIHF) Hall of Fame. Many foreign reporters could be seen cheering on the unified team members as they watched their matches. …
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