Team Great Britain’s Rose Harvey hit every runner’s worst fear during the women’s marathon at the Paris 2024 Olympics.
The 31-year-old suffered a broken leg during the race on Sunday, August 11, in a harrowing experience which she struggled through before finishing in 78th place.
“It was really hard,” Harvey told the BBC. “The hills didn’t help at all, the downhills were just agony and it just got worse and worse. Halfway through I knew it was going to be incredibly painful.”
In an Instagram post on Tuesday, August 13, Harvey explained that she broke her femur in the race while sharing a photo of herself on crutches.
She wrote that she felt a “tightness” in her hip two weeks before the Games and vowed to stay in the race after working hard in training and feeling “optimistic … I’ll be able to run the race I knew I had in me.”
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Rose Harvey on crutches after breaking her femur during the women’s marathon at the Paris Summer Olympics on August 11, 2024.
Rose Harvey/Instagram
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Two miles into the marathon, however, she “quickly realized it wasn’t going to happen,” describing the next 24 miles as a “painful battle.”
Harvey told the BBC that her fiance Charlie Thuillier encouraged her to keep going as he cheered her on from the sidelines.
“Every mile, I was just thinking, ‘Okay, just run to Charlie; run until the next time I see him,'” she recalled. “I think the other big thing is that I knew deep down that if I stopped I would always ask myself, ‘What if I could have just run an extra mile?’ And I couldn’t live with that.”
“Olympic energy was what kept me going to the finish,” she added.
Harvey went through the “agony” with a time of 2:51:03 in 78th place, ahead of the other two.
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Rose Harvey competes in the women’s marathon at the Summer Olympics in Paris on August 11, 2024.
Martin Rickett/PA Images via Getty
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In better condition, she might have won the marathon. In 2023, Harvey was selected for the Games after clocking 2:23:21 in Chicago – just 26 seconds behind the women’s marathon gold medalist, Sifan Hassan of the Netherlands.
Taking to Instagram, the British athlete said the experience was “heartbreaking”, adding: “But being a part of the Olympics is something I’ll never forget and being able to share the race with so many of my amazing friends and family meant the world to me. ”
Harvey began running professionally in 2022. By the following year, she was the fastest British woman to compete in the London Marathon, according to the outlet.
Her main focus now is getting well in time for her wedding in three weeks.
“My big challenge is, hopefully, to be without crutches for the wedding, but we’ll see. Maybe Charlie was walking down the aisle at this speed,” she added.
Categories: Trends
Source: HIS Education