Women’s champion Mula Seboka plans to spend some of her $200,000 (Dh734,069) prize money helping local orphans in her native Ethiopia.
The 29-year-old upset pre-race favourites Meselech Melkamu and Meseret Hailu to romp home in a time in a time of 2 hours 25 minutes and 1 second.
Seboka’s gutsy performance made her a clear and deserved winner and she showed what a class act she is afterwards.
She said: “I want to help some poor people in the area where I come from, children who don’t have a mother and father. I want to give to them.
“The rest? Me and my husband will decide, I need to speak to him first.”
Seboka put in a hard kick late on to pull away and win by 22 seconds, comfortably ahead of compatriots Melkamu (2:25:23) and Firehiwot Dado (2:25:53), with Hailu back in fourth.
While her run may have been similar in its structure to men’s winner Tsegaye Mekonnen, there could hardly have been two different champions.
Mekonnen sat in the winners’ press conference relaxed, jovial and extremely confident. But Seboka was almost painfully shy, seemingly overawed by what she had managed to achieve against such a deep field of champions who had won the world’s richest marathons.
Melkamu was the winner in Frankfurt in 2012, recording an extremely rapid 02:21:01 effort, while Dado is as distinguished as they come having won the last three Rome Marathons as well as winning in New York back in 2011.
A bashful Seboka said: “I am very happy to have won the Dubai marathon.
“It was not easy, there were a lot of fast athletes, but they gave to me and pushed me, I’m happy and lucky.
“There were three people together with me, I was thinking both the girls next to me are very fast so I thought they are better than me.
“I went for it for eight kilometres out and felt better than them, then I pulled ahead and left them behind.”
