Yang Fengxia Bids to Capture Victory for Chinese Women's Team in Greatest Race on Earth 2008/09
HONG KONG, Jan 31 /PRNewswire-AsiaNet/ --
- Summary: Hong Kong, Sunday 8th February 2009
China's Yang Fengxia will be hoping to overturn a
40-second deficit on Australia's Billinda Schipp, and snatch victory for the Chinese Women's team in the North
East Asia and Rest of The World category of The Greatest Race on Earth 2008/09 (GROE), which concludes
at Sunday's Standard Chartered Hong Kong Marathon.
GROE is the leading international marathon relay series which sees Men's and Women's national teams of
four runners competing at marathons in Nairobi, Singapore, Mumbai and Hong Kong. Each team member runs
one of the marathons, with the winning teams being the ones with the quickest cumulative times.
Lijuan Liu's great performance in Mumbai last month closed the gap on the Australian Women's team to
less than a minute, leaving Yang Fengxia with the chance to grab top spot in Hong Kong and win the USD
80,000 first prize for China.
The 21 year-old from Gansu Province will be hot favourite to turn the tables on her Australian rival, having a
personal best of 2 hours 29 minutes 40 seconds compared to Schipp's best of 2 hours 41 minutes 16 seconds.
Yang Fengxia will be joined in Hong Kong by Qiang Liu of the Chinese Men's team, who has an outside
chance of overtaking Brazil for third place in the Men's North East Asia and Rest of The World category,
starting the race just under 18 minutes behind.
For the first time GROE has partnered with Seeing is Believing (SiB), the global initiative which tackles
avoidable blindness and is a collaborative partnership between Standard Chartered and the International
Agency for Prevention of Blindness (IAPB).
A Visually Impaired All-Stars team are taking part in the series on behalf of SiB and China's Beijing
Paralympic Marathon winner and world record holder Qi Shun will be in Hong Kong to bring home the baton
for the VI All-Stars.
Footage shot to broadcast standards and free of charge and no copyright restrictions, is available via the
APTN TRANSMISSION
DATE: Sunday 8th February 2009
TIME: 09:15-09:30 GMT
REPLAY
DATE: Sunday 8th February 2009
TIME: 14:15-14:30 GMT
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SOURCE: The Greatest Race on Earth (GROE)
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