For our international visitors:
You may have noticed that on our website www.UltraNed.org we
followed the Spartathlon ‘live’ by frequent telephone calls by the
parents of one of the participants from The Netherlands. These
calls were forwarded by email by his wife (here in Utrecht) to the
UN editors. In the course of the race, it so happened that this
Dutch guy Jeffry Oonk finished third! (in 27 hours).
We understood only the nationality of the first two finishers: the
winner was from Japan, and no 2 is from Austria (Oesterreich), (not
from Australia as Jef’s parents firstly thought). Sorry that we have
no names sofar. You could keep track on a possible more detailed
result on both http://www.ultramarathonworld.com (hoping that
someone like Keith Ledgard will soon email something to David
Blaikie) and here at www.ultraned.org
NB UltraNed editor/provider Tom Hendriks was a participant
himself (but unfortunately had to quit after 118 km), so we hope
that he will recover soon from the disappointment and will visit an
internet cafe and supply some more info in the course of the day.
The official Spartathlon website is http://spartathlon.webvista.net
but we guess that the organizers are still very busy with the race
itself (the cutoff is 36 hours) and we expect that complete results
will not be published today.
Some info on the Dutch runners:
Jeffry Oonk (31) is the rookie among the five participants from The
Netherlands in this edition of the Spartahlon. But this spring he
already delivered his visiting card by finishing second in the Jan
Knippenberg Memorial, the (nearly) 100 miles along the beach of
Holland. He also finished fourth in the ‘Trail du Menhirs’ 100 km in France this May.
Wim-Bart Knol (38) was in fifth position in the Spartathlon this
morning but had vanished from the course at the time that Oonk had finished and Dutch
supporter Veron Lust and dropout Ron Teunisse went back on the
route to look for Wim-Bart. It turned out that he quit the race after over 200 km.
Wim-Bart was three times winner of the Jan Knippenberg
Memorial (1997, 1998, 2000) and runnerup in the 120 km of Texel(1995).
Experienced Ron Teunisse (50), in the past already twice runnerup
in the Spartathlon and also shared fourth with Wim Epskamp some
years ago, quit the race last night. He is winner of the first editions
of the 120 km of Texel (1993, 1995) and of the first edition of the
Jan Knippenberg Memorial (1996). He is still the national Dutch
record holder on the 24 hrs (261.475 km, Apeldoorn 1990). After
staying out of competition for several years, Ron made a
comeback this year, finishing third in the Jan Knippenberg
Memorial and second in the Frisian Eleven Cities 205 km.
Rut Zoutman (43) was this years’ winner of the Jan Knippenberg
Memorial. Nearly three years ago, in the MillenniumRun 200 km
around part of the IJssel Lake, he was fourth behind Paul Beckers
(B; 18.13.26), Wim Epskamp (NL) and Anatoli Laputs (Rus), in
22.30.10.
For Tom Hendriks (45) this was his debut in the Spartathlon (as it
was for Jeffry and Rut). The longest race sofar for Tom was the
Frisian Eleven Cities 205 km (premiere June 2002), where he
became fourth.
Responsible editor: Martien Baars, baars-kliphuis@hetnet.nl