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South African marathon wheelchair champion Ernst Van Dyk (pictured) claimed his eighth Boston Marathon trophy April 20, tying women's wheelchair champ Jean Driscoll for most Boston victories ever.
Van Dyk crossed the finish line at 10:55 a.m., just about 90 minutes after he started the race in Hopkinton, battling a strong head wind all the way that put him 16 minutes behind his 2008 finishing time.
With the win, Van Dyk surpassed previous men's all-time title holder Clarence DeMar, who had seven Boston wins.
Defending women's wheelchair champ Wakako Tsuchida of Japan also claimed victory, crossing the finish line in just under two hours at 1:54:37.
More than 26,000 runners were signed up to run the Boston Marathon under cool, overcast skies Monday. The 26.2-mile race from Hopkinton to Boston has been dominated by elite African runners in recent years.
Van Dyk said Heartbreak Hill is always the roughest part of the race for him.
As he waited for the gun to go off at the starting line Monday, he said it's all in a day's work for him.
"It's what I do. It's my job, coming to work every day," Van Dyke said, adding that he's scheduled to race in marathons in London and Korea in the next few weeks.
Beth Haller, Ph.D., is Co-Director of the Global Alliance for Disability in Media and Entertainment (www.gadim.org). A former print journalist, she is a member of the Advisory Board for the National Center on Disability and Journalism (https://ncdj.org/). Haller is Professor Emerita in the Department of Mass Communication at Towson University in Maryland, USA. Haller is co-editor of the 2020 "Routledge Companion to Disability and Media" (with Gerard Goggin of University of Sydney & Katie Ellis of Curtin University, Australia). She is author of "Representing Disability in an Ableist World: Essays on Mass Media" (Advocado Press, 2010) and the author/editor of Byline of Hope: Collected Newspaper and Magazine Writing of Helen Keller (Advocado Press, 2015). She has been researching disability representation in mass media for 30+ years. She is adjunct faculty in the Disability Studies programs at the City University of New York (CUNY) and the University of Texas-Arlington.
Part of the story from WVCB-TV in Boston:
