Weather problems cause late change to Moorea Marathon
A run of bad weather has forced a change of course for the 26th edition of the Moorea Marathon in French Polynesia.
Transcript
A run of bad weather has forced a change of course for the 26th edition of the Moorea Marathon in French Polynesia.
Competitors from as far away as the United States, Europe and Japan will line up this weekend with distances ranging from the full 42 kilometres to an 800 metre dash.
One of the organisers of the event, Angela Tom Sing Vien, told Vinnie Wylie that attracting entries is always a challenge.
ANGELA TOM SING VIEN: We tried to attract people through internet, Facebook, media and stuff but it's really hard for us because French Polynesia is so small and you know that it is very far from international. We tried to promote the event to expo in Hawaii [and] Paris. We went also to London and Madrid but the difficult part is to bring people because it's too far. We have people from France, USA, Italy, Japan, Holland and we've got around for the whole event about 60 to 80 foreigners.
VINNIE WYLIE: How many locals?
ATSV: For the marathon we have approximately 120 participants, for the half marathon we have like 350 - that's everyone including overseas.
VW: There's the full marathon, the half marathon and the 5km as well so people of sort of all fitness can take part.
ATSV: Exactly. We also have for the little ones a family run for 800m for little ones and their parents to participate in the event also. We have quite some activities around the event also. We try to keep our culture like fire-dancing [to] show people from abroad about why the culture is important for us here.
VW: Ok Angela and most importantly not long now until it all gets underway. What is the weather forecast like - is it going to be a good day for running?
ATSV: This is not good because we changed the course. It used to be at the public beach of Temae but when we had the bad weather about two weeks ago the road was quite damaged. The welcoming site in Temae is not very appropriate to organise the marathon so we changed everything and everything is happening on Cooks Bay. All of us are stressed about all those difficulties but [we will] try to get everything ready by tomorrow and then the races can start.
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