This year’s RSU marathon team will be distinctly international

RSU will be represented by a team of 254 runners representing 18 countries at the Tet Riga Marathon which will be held on 19 May this year. The number of countries represented increased by two compared to last year’s event when RSU was the largest team among all Latvian university teams. The RSU team also took the lead in regards to international coverage received.

Around half of this year’s team will be composed of local runners while the majority the rest of the team will be represented by runners from Germany, Sweden, Finland, Norway and Italy. Other countries represented include Portugal, the UK, Israel, India, the Netherlands, Denmark, South Africa, Sri Lanka, Greece, Luxembourg, USA and Afghanistan. The majority of international students will compete in the 21km race – 14 international and only 2 local students chose to compete in this distance. RSU is hoping for great achievements in the 10km race as medical student Jaakko Nieminen, who was the silver medallist in 2017 and 2018, will participate this year as well.

The organisers of Tet Riga Marathon have set a goal to increase the number of international runners to 10 000 hoping that one out of five participants will be from abroad within the next five years.

For the first time this year the marathon was awarded the Road Race Gold Label by the International Association of Athletics Federation’s (IAAF) recognition after the federation assessed the track, infrastructure, participant safety, availability of medical services and other indicators. Last year only 36 marathons in the world had this status with Tokyo, Paris, New York, Boston, Berlin and other prestigious marathons among them. The Riga Marathon is the only marathon in the Northern Europe to receive the Gold Label. The capital of Latvia has organised a marathon since 1991.

Photo gallery from the 2018 marathon