Celebrating the Paris Marathon in an Olympic Year

First, the Marathon de Paris is big. You have 54,000 people running in the streets of Paris around major monuments like the Opéra Garnier and the Eiffel Tower, and outwards on two roads taking in forest scenes around the Bois de Vincennes and the Bois de Boulogne before participants head back in to the city to finish near the Arc de Triomphe.

And this year was special because the Olympics are coming up. In August, the Marathon Pour Tous (“The Marathon for All”) will give 35,000 people who’ve managed to win bibs over the preceding year the chance to run the same 42km route as the Olympic athletes who will thunder across the city only a few days later.

But for those who aren’t lucky enough to have gained a spot in that event, the Marathon de Paris was especially alluring this year. Many of those who ran it weren’t Parisians or even French. Many were tourists. They came for the chance to race through the streets of the City of Light, with its landmarks and cobblestones. For the chance to run across a postcard.

For the French athletes looking to the Olympics, this was not the race for qualification. It’s not a fast race, and the proportion of elite athletes is tiny. There were maybe 40–50 elites in the race, and the first Frenchman came in at 12th place in the men’s race.

Ethiopian runners won both the men’s and women’s Paris Marathon on their first attempts. Mulugeta Uma won the men’s race in a time of 2:05.28, followed by Kenyans Titus Kipruto (2:05:48) and 2021 champion Elisha Rotich (2:06.54). In the women’s race, Mestawut Fikir was neck and neck with her compatriot Enat Tirusew but pulled ahead to win in a time of 2:20:45, with Tirusew three seconds behind. Kenyan Olympian Vivian Cheruiyot took bronze in 2:21.46.

Even looking at those elite times, you can see that Paris is not a super-fast marathon like Berlin or Valencia. And it’s not a major like Boston, or like London later this month, so it doesn’t attract the world’s absolute best.

But sometimes it’s good to have a marathon that’s more about vibes than performance. We always talk about times, paces and splits, about breaking records. This isn’t that – sometimes it’s nice to run for joy and not for time. For the love of running and the emotion of moving through a city as beautiful as Paris.

The marathon’s main sportswear sponsor, ASICS, seemed to understand that. Along with more community-embedded outfits like Distance, Eight8Lanes and Jolie Foulée, they put on a Festival of Running that made the weekend more of a celebration of running itself rather than of any particular elite achievement.

The Festival of Running began with a big expo on Thursday and then ramped up on the Friday evening with ASICS athletes attempting to break speed records over 5km and 10 km while wearing the new Metaspeed Paris shoe. This night race took in a 2.5km loop in the streets of central Paris – with roads closed to create a start and finish line at the Palais Royal, just a block over from the Louvre.

Then on Sunday, during the marathon itself, I was posted up in the forest, between kilometres 36 and 37.

I hope you enjoy these shots!