The thousands of participants in the London marathon will be united as never before in the face of the Boston marathon bomb attacks
Runners set off at a recent
London marathon, which this year will be overshadowed by the bomb attacks at the
Boston event Photo:
REUTERS
Marathons, as anyone who has ever run one will know, are uniquely
life-affirming events. What other sporting occasion brings together tens of
thousands of spectators and competitors, many running for a higher cause, to
honour absent friends, to discover something about themselves or just for the
sheer, feel-good fun of it? These events are worth fighting for, something to
protect and cherish.
When the news broke of the bombs that ripped apart the Boston marathon on
Monday night, like many I struggled to comprehend what had happened. Footage on
the rolling news channels was so out of place – with scenes reminiscent of a war
zone – that there was an almost unreal quality about it.
It was only when I looked at some raw photos on social-media sites that the
reality hit home. One image in particular stayed with me. It showed a young man
in a grey T-shirt being pushed along in a wheelchair. His leg below the knee had
been shredded of its flesh to reveal the bare bone. There was no foot.
Then I read about Martin Richard, the eight-year-old boy who came with his
family to watch friends cross the finish line. He was killed instantly while his
mother and sister suffered dreadful injuries.
I remembered how my wife and young children had come to watch me, and were
sitting in the stands on the Mall in 2005, when I completed my first and only
London marathon. My time was four hours 10 minutes – precisely the time after
which the bombs were detonated in Boston. (The majority of runners finish
between four and five hours; detonating two bombs at four hours 10 minutes was
intended to kill and injure as many people as possible.)
But there was another reason for my disbelief. In 2008, I wrote a novel that
opens with a bomb attack on the London marathon. No members of the public were
killed in my book – the only casualty was a lone suicide bomber – but the
similarities with the tragic events this week were enough for friends to email
me about life imitating art and for strangers to tweet more conspiratorially.
I feel no grim satisfaction at the book’s verisimilitude, just an overwhelming sense of grief: for the three people who died, for the 170 wounded and for “big city” marathons, which will never be quite the same again.
More
I feel no grim satisfaction at the book’s verisimilitude, just an overwhelming sense of grief: for the three people who died, for the 170 wounded and for “big city” marathons, which will never be quite the same again.
More
