London Marathon 2024: ‘Hardest Geezer’ Russ Cook among record 50,000 to take part in race

A father operating the TCS London Marathon to help Great Ormond Street Hospital Children’s Charity stated his younger daughter’s most cancers remedy was “a million times harder” than tackling 26.2 miles.

Sky, now aged 4, was identified with medulloblastoma, a tumour in her mind, in April 2021 after her mother and father observed she misplaced her stability ceaselessly and was not assembly some developmental milestones.

Good morning and welcome to The Independent’s reside protection of the London Maraton.

The occasion will get underway in a number of hours, with elite and charitable runners taking part in the 26.2 mile run throughout the capital.

Stay tuned for all the newest updates.

The London Marathon returns in 2024 with one other action-packed day of elite and charitable racing.

The annual highway race in the English capital is once more held in a standard slot in April, with hundreds getting into the mass participation occasion and bidding to full the 26.2-mile course.

Here is every little thing you want to learn about when it begins, the route it’ll take and the way to watch:

The poll for subsequent 12 months’s TCS London Marathon opened on the eve of the 2024 occasion.

A world record 578,000 individuals entered the poll for this 12 months’s occasion, making it the most well-liked marathon in the world.

More than 50,000 individuals, a record quantity, are anticipated to take part on what’s due to be a dry and vivid Sunday with temperatures up to 12C.

This 12 months’s race will mark the primary time that wheelchair and non-disabled athletes have obtained the identical prize cash for a marathon.

All 4 winners of the elite races will obtain £44,000, with the runner-up incomes £24,000 and third place taking residence £18,000.

Mr Cook, from West Sussex, stated he deliberate to run the marathon for charity regardless of solely ending his 352-day problem on 7 April.

Although the winners as not as properly paid as in another iconic sporting occasions, the elite males’s and ladies’s able-bodied races and males’s and ladies’s wheelchair races will all have a prize pot of $308,000 (£243,000)

Here’s how a lot the winners will obtain:

For these impressed or eager to expertise the magic, you’ll be able to apply for entry into subsequent 12 months’s race.

Here’s all you want to know concerning the poll and the way to get into subsequent 12 months’s London Marathon:

The Sky Sports F1 presenter speaks to Kieran Jackson about her first marathon this Sunday and the work carried out in reminiscence of her good buddy Flack, who took her personal life in 2020.

Read the complete interview right here.