Photo: AFP
New York City has hosted hundreds of world-class sporting events, from the World Series to the Super Bowl. It has seen champions crowned and watched the underdogs have their one big moment in countless endeavors. Perhaps no sporting event, however, encapsulates the spirit of competition and spectacle quite like the New York City marathon; from the sight of thousands of runners pounding across the Verrazzano Bridge to the sight of a solitary runner breaking the tape in Central Park, the marathon is in a class all its own. Rob Simmelkjaer is the Chief Executive Officer of the New York Road Runners; he appeared on 710 WOR’s Mendte in the Morning program to give us the run-down of what to expect on Sunday.
Simmelkjaer explained for host Larry Mendte why he thinks the spectacle of the race is like no other sporting event in the world: “I say all the time that the TCS New York City Marathon is the only event that takes over the city. This is such a big city, it’s such a diverse city… and this is the one day that… we all kind of come together, you know, because this is an event that comes through our neighborhoods. For so many New Yorkers, they are looking out their windows, they are walking down their blocks, and they are seeing these 55,000 plus runners from all over the world run right through their neighborhood, and it’s so exciting for all of us to go out and support those runners, whether we know someone in the race or they’re just total strangers.”
Simmelkjaer encourages people to cheer on the runners, but if they can do so with a hint of humor, it boosts the runners’ spirits: “I just ran a marathon myself a couple of weeks ago in Chicago, so I saw a lot of great signs… [but] the one I loved the most is, ‘Therapy was an option, too!’, as if to say, if you’re doing all this running for your mental health, you could have just gone to therapy. That always cracks me up.”
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