Athletics legends donate memorabilia to MOWA – Athletics Weekly

Museum of World Athletics benefits from items received from a collection of global track and field icons.

Ten athletics legends donated shoes or apparel to the Museum of World Athletics at special ceremony in Tokyo this week.

The festivities took place at the MOWA exhibition, which will have been viewed by more than 200,000 visitors — a record for any MOWA display — by the end of the championships. Olympic artefacts highlight a trip the 45th floor observatory, while a larger collection from the World Championships are featured on the second floor.

World Athletics President Sebastian Coe accepted the donations from a group he termed “wide and far apart,” that included sprints legend Don Quarrie, 800m runner Ellen van Langen, three marathoners, two hurdlers, decathlete Trey Hardee and high jumper Nicola Olyslagers, who could not attend because she is preparing for her competition, and was represented by her husband Rhys.

Canadian race walker Evan Dunfee, the world 35km race walk winner in Tokyo, also donated the bib and cap he wore while setting the 35km world record in March.

Michael Burke, the founding patron of the museum, presented the athletes with special MOWA donor pins.

As a testament to the drawing power of the exhibition, global champions, many who have already contributed items to MOWA, attended the ceremony, including Billy Mills, returning to the city of his Olympic 10,000m triumph in 1964, Willie Banks, Kevin Young, Lasse Viren, Rosa Mota and Daley Thompson among others.

Heritage Director Chris Turner began the ceremony by introducing 84-year-old Japanese running legend Kenji Kimihara, the 1966 Boston Marathon champion who won the Olympic silver medal in the marathon in 1968. He donated his singlet and bib from the 1972 Munich Games, where he placed fifth. “The race lives on in my mind,” Kimihara said.

Mizuki Noguchi, the 2004 marathon gold medallist and silver medallist at the 2003 World Championships, continued the tradition of Japanese long-distance running. She presented the bib from her Asian record victory in the 2005 Berlin Marathon, where she set world records at 25km and 30km along the way, and donated a pair of her training shoes from the 2008 season.

Another marathoner, Constantina Dita, who is now the president of Romanian athletics, was the 2008 Olympic champion at age 38, making her the oldest runner to achieve that distinction. She donated one of two pairs of shoes she was given by ASICS for the Beijing Games.

The ceremony then turned to the shorter distances to fete Jamaica’s Quarrie. He donated the tracksuit he wore on the podium during the 1976 Montreal Olympics where he received the gold medal in the 200m. Quarrie also won the silver in the 100m.

Van Langen, the Olympic gold medallist in the 800m in 1992, presented her podium jacket with the famous tulip emblem from the Netherlands.

Joanna Hayes, the 2004 gold medallist in the 100m hurdles for the United States, is now a coach and is in Tokyo guiding Olympic 400m hurdles champion Rai Benjamin.

Because a lot of Hayes’ memorabilia from 2004 was lost during evacuation from the January fires in California, she donated the one singlet she still from 2004, her season ending World Athletics Final victory in Monaco.

Hardee was a pole vaulter until his coaches convinced him to try the decathlon, so he went from a “fun event to an incredibly difficult event,” he said. The 2009 and 2011 world champion for the USA donated his spikes from the London 2012 Olympics decathlon, where he won the silver medal.

Ladj Doucouré, who won gold medals in the 110m hurdles and the sprint relay at the 2005 Worlds, compared the pressure of competing in the French version of ‘Dancing With the Stars’ with running. “Dancing is easy for everybody,” he said, “but track and field is hard.”

The final presentation was one that Turner called “the most personal thing the collection has ever received.” Olyslagers, who won the 2004 World Indoor Championships for Australia and is a two-time Olympic silver medallist, donated her training diary from 2022. Her husband Rhys said the diary, which includes notes as well as artwork, speaks for her journey and process.