LONDON—Marathon runner Mary Keitany retired from the sport on Wednesday because of a back injury, ending a career in which she won multiple races in London and New York and set the world record for a women-only race.
The 39-year-old Kenyan said pandemic-related travel restrictions have stopped her from coming to Europe to get treatment on an injury sustained in 2019.
“Every time I thought I had got over the injury and started training hard, it became a problem again,” Keitany said. “So now is the time to say goodbye—if only as an elite runner—to the sport I love so much.”
Keitany won the London Marathon three times, in 2011, 2012 and 2017. In her victory in 2017, she finished in two hours, 17 minutes and one second. Only two women—Brigid Kosgei and Paula Radcliffe—have run a marathon quicker and they were in races also containing male pacesetters.
World Athletics makes a distinction between the record times set by Keitany and Kosgei, who ran the Chicago Marathon in 2:14:04.
Keitany was a four-time winner of the New York City Marathon (2014-16 and 2018), and also won the world half marathon title in 2009.
She said she has no specific plans for the future and is looking forward to spending more time with her family.
Yuriy Sedykh, a two-time Olympic champion in the hammer throw whose world record from 1986 still stands, has died. He was 66.
The Russian track and field federation said Sedykh died early Tuesday following a heart attack.
“Deeply mourn the loss of Yuriy Sedykh,” World Athletics senior vice president and pole vault great Sergei Bubka wrote on Twitter. “For me, Yuriy was a friend, a wise mentor.”
Sedykh won gold at the 1976 and 1980 Olympics, but missed the 1984 Los Angeles Games because of a Soviet boycott. He returned to win a silver medal at the 1988 Seoul Olympics and won a world title in 1991.
Sedykh threw a world record 86.74 meters at the European Championships in Stuttgart, Germany, a mark which still stands. At this year’s Tokyo Olympics, all 12 finalists in the men’s hammer were born after Sedykh set the record.
Sedykh made his huge throw at a time when track and field was starting to realize the scale of performance-enhancing drug use.
Former Moscow anti-doping laboratory director Grigory Rodchenkov wrote in a book last year that Sedykh was “a huge steroid abuser” who benefited from a Soviet cover-up. Rodchenkov said one of Sedykh’s samples contained such large traces of the steroid stanozolol that it contaminated laboratory equipment.
Sedykh denied doping. In a 2015 interview with Russian newspaper Sport Express, Sedykh said athletes’ big throws in the 1980s were because of better coaching and the Soviet Union’s intensive talent scouting program.
After retiring, Sedykh worked in France as a physical education teacher. He was married to another Soviet world record holder, shot putter Natalya Lisovskaya. Their daughter Alexia won hammer gold for France at the 2010 Youth Olympics.