Biography
Wami won gold at the 1999 World Championships in Seville, timing 30:24.56, which was a new African Record and Championships Record. She also won the 10,000 m gold medal at the 1999 All-Africa Games that year. She is a two-time winner of the IAAF World Cross Country Championships, having taken the long race title in 1996 and then the short race title in 2001.
Wami won the 2006 Berlin Marathon, finishing in front of Salina Kosgei and Monika Drybulska on September 24. She was expected to beat the world record over 15 km during the Zevenheuvelenloop in and around Nijmegen on 19 November 2006, but failed. Wami finished in second position during the race, nine seconds behind Mestewat Tufa, who finished in 47:22.
In 2007, Wami won the Berlin Marathon again. She competed in the New York Marathon thirty-five days later and she finished 23 seconds behind Paula Radcliffe. Her second-place finish gave her the World Marathon Majors Series Title, earning herself the $500,000 jackpot.
In August 2008, Gete Wami dropped out of the 2008 Beijing Olympic Marathon, after running in the lead pack for much of the race, as did her teammate Berhane Adere.
Read more about this topic: Gete Wami
Famous quotes containing the word biography:
“A great biography should, like the close of a great drama, leave behind it a feeling of serenity. We collect into a small bunch the flowers, the few flowers, which brought sweetness into a life, and present it as an offering to an accomplished destiny. It is the dying refrain of a completed song, the final verse of a finished poem.”
—André Maurois (1885–1967)
“In how few words, for instance, the Greeks would have told the story of Abelard and Heloise, making but a sentence of our classical dictionary.... We moderns, on the other hand, collect only the raw materials of biography and history, “memoirs to serve for a history,” which is but materials to serve for a mythology.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“A biography is like a handshake down the years, that can become an arm-wrestle.”
—Richard Holmes (b. 1945)