The Chinese communist regime announced on May 23 that 21 athletes, including China’s marathon champions, died at the Gansu ultramarathon due to the extreme weather.
The death list includes Liang Jing, 31, China’s ultramarathon record holder, Huang Guanjun, 34, winner of the men’s marathon for hearing-impaired runners at China’s 2019 National Paralympic Games, and famous ultramarathon runners Huang Yinbin and Cao Pengfei.
“All elite ultramarathon runners died,” a Chinese netizen wrote on Weibo on Sunday.
From videos and photos that surviving sportsmen shot onsite and shared on social media, the athletes dressed in shorts were stuck in no man’s land and couldn’t procure clothes to stay warm or food to keep going.
May 25, 2021
The ultramarathon in rugged Gansu province.
Screengrab/YouTube/CCTV
The Chinese central government and state media have criticised “certain” officials for putting profit above safety when organising extreme sports events after 21 competitors died in an ultramarathon.
The country’s top disciplinary watchdog has also ordered the provincial authorities to carry out an in-depth investigation into Saturday’s event, after runners, most of whom were not carrying warm weather clothing, were hit by icy rain on the mountain trail.
The 100km Yellow River Stone Forest Park event in the northwestern province of Gansu had been billed as one of the most challenging events in Chinese sporting history and attracted a total of 172 competitors.
On Saturday, 21 athletes died during the fourth annual Yellow River Stone Forest Park 100K, a race held in Gansu, China. The weather turned bad about 15 miles in and more than 6,000 feet above sea level, after the leading runners left the second checkpoint and started an exposed 3,000-foot climb. Suddenly, the route was hammered with a mess of freezing rain and hail, and temperatures plummeted to near freezing at higher elevations.
“At the bottom of the mountain there was already wind and rain, and the higher you climbed the bigger the rain and wind got,” blogged Zhang Xiaotao, a racer who survived the storm. “Halfway up, the rain started to mix with hail and kept smashing into my face, and my eyes started getting obscured and blurry. A few places, you couldn’t make out the route clearly.” Another racer he came across on the trail, he wrote, “had begun to shake all over his body.”
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