Valencia is preparing for its first major athletics event in 2023. The fifteenth edition of the 10K Valencia Ibercaja was presented this Friday with the presence of the Ethiopian athlete Yalemzerf Yehualaw, who will try to break the record in the distance that she herself holds. Together with her, who could not attend the last edition due to COVID, a group of 16 African athletes will participate who “come very strong”, as highlighted by the director of the 10K Valencia Ibercaja Álex Aparicio.
Yehualaw, who arrived in Valencia on Thursday night and is surprised by the city’s weather, said “she feels very happy to be running this Sunday in Valencia (…) I hope that the 10K is the icing on the cake of my previous specific winter training at the start of preparation for the London Marathon,” he added. She will wear the number 1 bib.
Enlarge
20 athletes with the most accredited under 28′
The test, which keeps the men’s world record set in January 2020 by Kenyan athlete Rhonex Kipruto (26:24), will also feature the best European athletes this Sunday. “The best European athletes want to run the 10K Valencia Ibercaja, and the test has around 20 athletes with accredited sub 28′ marks,” said Aparicio.
More than 12,000 popular brokers
The test will count in its popular category with more than 12,000 runners, thus recovering numbers prior to the pandemic, which will take the exit from Paseo de la Alameda starting at 9:30 a.m., with up to five exits separated by five minutes.
So far, of the 12,004 registered participants, 69% are men, 31% are women, and 39 people have selected the non-binary option. Likewise, runners from about 30 different nationalitiesamong which stand out after Spain, France, Italy, the United Kingdom and Germany, come to run at the 10K Valencia Ibercaja.
In addition, in this edition the 10K Valencia Ibercaja will also will hold a parallel 5K for the first timewhich will have about 1,500 participants, the limit established in this 1st edition, who will start from the Puente de las Flores at 9:00 a.m., half an hour before the 10K and will enter the same finish line.
In the 5K, the large female participation stands out, reaching 57%, an outstanding figure on the national scene in races of these characteristics, thus achieving one of the objectives of the test, to achieve #LaMitadMásUna (that more than half of the participants are women). In addition, it also stands out that 32% of the participants will debut in the distance.