Getting on the podium had not even crossed Crystal Vut Tsz-ying’s mind when she set off in the Hong Kong half-marathon from Nathan Road in Tsim Tsa Tsui in the early hours of Sunday morning.
But with no invited overseas runners due to Covid-19 restrictions, the 31-year-old Hongkonger stormed to victory in the women’s 21-kilometre race, crossing the finish line at Victoria Park in one hour, 20 minutes and 41 seconds.
Sweden’s Ellinor Sallander could only finish a distant second nearly six minutes back in 1:26:01, ahead of third-placed Ella Au Wing-ning (1:26:44) of Hong Kong.
“I didn’t even think about getting a medal, so getting No 1 makes me really happy,” Asian Games representative Vut told reporters in a post-race media scrum.
Vut’s time may have been 1:33 short of her personal best, which she had set in Gdynia, Poland in October 2020 at the World Athletics Half Marathon Championships, but she was not letting anything take away from her dominant victory.
“Although I didn’t break my personal best, I performed much better than I had in training,” she said. “I started off quicker, because I thought I would need time for the elevation and the turns.
“So I was just thinking about how I can control my own pace. Although there is about and minute and a half difference from my PB, I still think my condition is quite good because we’re sort of in the off-season anyway, and it’s difficult to run in the off-season.”
Vut was also pleasantly surprised after the runners were informed they could remove their face masks during the race, which was cancelled last year and postponed from its usual February slot in 2021 because of the pandemic.
“It’s Covid, so the start was a big influence, because we thought we’d have to wear masks,” she said. “But we were told soon after that we could take it off and keep running, so there wasn’t too much difference in the end.”
Not that having to wear a mask would have given any of her rivals a chance on Sunday.
“Last year when I went to Poland at the world champs, I had to do the same, I had to wear masks and stuff and do all the tests before I could run. So I’m very used to it,” Vut said.
“But having the mask disposal unit did make us a feel a lot more relieved and we could focus on the event itself.”
