Team GB athlete completed Olympics marathon with damaged leg

A Team GB runner in the Paris Olympics marathon has revealed how she recorded her sub three hour time despite breaking a leg in the race.

Rose Harvey, from Evesham, Worcestershire, was only two miles into Sunday morning’s event when her stiff hip started getting “really, pretty painful”.

However, she battled through the “agony” to finish 78th in a time of 2:51:03 in 24C heat before it later emerged she had a stress fracture of her femur.

“It was really tough,” Harvey said, first revealing her injury to the BBC. “The hills didn’t help at all, the downhills were just agony and it just got worse and worse. At the halfway mark I knew it was going to be incredibly painful.” 

The 31-year-old, who is currently on crutches, faces a battle to start walking normally again ahead of her wedding in three weeks. She had been feeling a tightness in her hip for around three weeks prior to Sunday’s marathon, which was won by the Netherlands’ Sifan Hassan in 2:22:55.

Doctors and physios had told Harvey that running the marathon would make her tight hip worse. But with no Team GB reserve available to fill her space, Harvey decided to attempt the event.

“The Olympic energy was kind of what kept me going to that finish line,” she said. “Any other race I would have stopped, because I wasn’t able to run like I normally can… and the pain was really bad, but I just had to get to that finish line, I had to do the Olympic marathon.”

Harvey went professional in 2022 and she was the fastest British woman at the London Marathon that year. Her running time of 2:23.21 in Chicago last year was the fifth fastest-ever marathon time for a British woman.

Hassan, meanwhile, produced one of the most remarkable athletics performances in Olympic history by becoming the first woman – and first person since Emil Zatopek in 1952 – to win medals in the 5,000m, 10,000m and marathon.

She also followed up her two track bronzes with a golden flourish, sprinting to victory in the women’s marathon ahead of the Ethiopian world record-holder Tigst Assefa in a dramatic finish.

Hassan had only completed the 10,000m on Friday night but, after less than 36 hours to recover, she was back out in the streets of Paris on Sunday morning and setting an Olympic record despite an unusually hilly course.