By Paul Gains
A year after achieving victory in the 2024 TCS Toronto Waterfront Marathon Ethiopia’s Mulugeta Uma has announced he will return to this World Athletics Elite Label race and defend his title.
“My aim is to run a fast time but if I am unable to run a fast time I must win the race,” says the 27-year-old of his intentions for the October 19 event.
Mulugeta’s addition reunites the three podium finishers from that 2024 race as the two Kenyan runners who finished behind him, Dominic Ngeno (2nd in 2024) and Noah Kipkemboi (3rd place), have already been confirmed.
The Ethiopian is a man capable of running much faster than he did on that day (2:07:16). Indeed, his stunning victory at the 2024 Paris Marathon was achieved with a personal best time of 2:05:33 and earlier this year, at the Tokyo Marathon, he ran 2:05:46 for 5th place. Tokyo is a World Marathon Major event with formidable competition. Against this backdrop he remembers Toronto vividly.
“In the 2024 Toronto marathon, after half-way, no one was willing to lead but the Kenyan athlete (Ngeno) had a big surge and disappeared from our sight,” he recalls from his last visit.
“We decided to leave him and thought we were going for second place. In a while I decided to try my best to catch him and, finally, I caught him and managed to win the race.”
The top prize money in Toronto was $20,000 CDN (since increased to $25,000 CDN for the 2025 event) which made it a welcome payday. Besides winning the event he has other memories of his first time in Canada’s largest city.
“I enjoyed the course and had an amazing experience in Toronto,” he adds. “I do have friends there and they are the ones who took me sightseeing in Toronto.”
Born in Waliso, about 100 kilometres southwest of the Ethiopian capital of Addis Ababa, he took up running as a youngster after seeing the success of Ethiopian runners on the Olympic stage. His family are farmers and had he not become a successful runner he would almost assuredly have followed that path.
As a teenager he had tremendous success in the 1,500m event, winning silver medals at both the 2014 Olympic Youth Championships and the 2015 IAAF World Youth Championships. But his career came to a halt when he ruptured his Achilles tendon, an injury he believes was caused by running in spikes.
It led to a seven-year hiatus from the sport. But inspiration came from watching one of his heroes transition to road racing.
“Kenenisa (Bekele) was the athlete who inspired me,” he reveals. “I was eager to achieve what he did on the track. Annoyingly, my injury prevented me from the track racing I loved but still my role model showed me I could run sub 2:02 thus I am working hard to run a fast time like him.”
Bekele, a three-time Olympic gold medalist on the track, missed the then world record by a mere two seconds when he ran 2:01:41 in the 2019 Berlin Marathon.
Mulugeta is married to Bone Chuluka who has herself represented Ethiopia at two World Cross Country Championships earning medals in the relay event. The couple at this time have no children.
The TCS Toronto Waterfront Marathon course record is 2:05:00 set in 2019 by Kenya’s Philemon Rono. With training now going well for the race his response to whether he might challenge that time is succinct. ‘Yes, why not?”Few would doubt his ability to break that record.
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