Japan Names Marathon Teams for Tokyo World Championships – Brett Larner – Japan Running News

On the men’s side the team is led by last year’s Fukuoka International Marathon CR breaker Yuya Yoshida and this year’s Osaka runner-up Ryota Kondo. The 3rd spot on the team is reserved for JMC Series winner Naoki Koyama, who hasn’t cleared the 2:06:30 World Championships qualifying standard and has to wait for the May 4 qualifying deadline for confirmation that the 1184 points he has in the Road to Tokyo rankings are enough to get him in. That currently puts him between the 54th and 55th-ranked athletes, so he looks pretty safe, whatever the merits of putting someone who hasn’t broken 2:10 in his last two races on the team based on performances in 2023 and early 2024 over the 20 other Japanese men ahead of him in the Road to Tokyo rankings.

In the only moderate surprise, the 2nd Japanese man in Osaka, Kyohei Hosoya, was named alternate over his former Chuo Gakuin University teammate Tsubasa Ichiyama, the top Japanese man in Tokyo. Purely based on numbers Hosoya beat Ichiyama fair and square, 2:05:58 and 4th in Osaka vs. Ichiyama’s 2:06:00 and 10th in Tokyo.

But Ichiyama ran against a much more competitive field, was faster than Hosoya over the 2nd half of the race, 1:02:44/1:03:16 to Hosoya’s 1:02:29/1:03:29, and most importantly ran in hot conditions closer to what it will be like in Tokyo in September than the freezing cold and light snow that Hosoya had in Osaka. It’s not hard to see what the JAAF values here.