THE SEOUL GAMES / DAY 7 : Mota Wins Marathon, Support From Home

The woman who was advised none too politely by her countrymen to forget running and start raising a family today is receiving love sonnets from the Portugese.

Rosa Mota, who became the first woman from Portugal to win a medal when she finished third in the first Olympic women’s marathon 4 years ago in Los Angeles, won the 26.2-mile race Friday in 2 hours 25 minutes 40 seconds, a respectable time considering the heat, humidity and Seoul’s smog-filled air.

When she finished, Mota, 30, looked as if she could have run at least another 10K. She smiled broadly at the finish line and then began looking for her coach and fiance, Jose Pedrosa, who fought through the heavy security to reach the track inside the Olympic Stadium to embrace her.

Mota then ran back to the finish line, where she helped the collapsed runnerup, Lisa Martin of Australia, to her feet and hugged her. Martin, who attended the University of Oregon and lives in Mesa, Ariz., entered the stadium about 100 meters behind Mota and finished in 2:25.53. East Germany’s Katrin Doerre was third in 2:26.21.

Nancy Ditz, two-time L.A. Marathon champion from Woodside, Calif., was the first U.S. runner to enter the stadium, finishing 17th.

Perhaps the world’s best-known marathon runner, Norway’s Grete Waitz, eight-time New York City Marathon champion and runnerup to the United States’ Joan Benoit Samuelson in the 1984 Olympics, managed to stay with the leaders for about the first half of the race before falling off the pace. She did not finish.

Waitz, 34, hoped to match Samuelson not only as a gold medalist but also as a medical marvel. Samuelson had arthroscopic knee surgery within 17 days of the U.S. trials in 1984. Not to be outdone, Waitz had similar surgery Aug. 8 of this year. But although she said that she has recovered from the surgery, she wasn’t able to overcome her lack of recent training.

Samuelson won in Los Angeles 4 years ago with a bold move, running away from Waitz and the other leaders 3 miles into the race. She was never challenged, finishing in 2:24.52.

No one was so courageous Friday.

The race had a less than perfect start at just past 9:30 a.m. (Seoul time), when a few runners near the back of the pack became tangled. Two fell but were able to continue. Martin led the leaders out of the stadium, followed closely by about 20 other runners, including Mota, Waitz and Doerre.

As Mota was the favorite, it made sense for those with designs on medals to follow her. Until near the end, she made no real attempt to leave them behind, turning the race into a war of attrition.

The conditions did part of her work for her. Although it was only 61 degrees when the race began, there was 92% humidity. It was 76 degrees at the finish with 50% humidity. But taking more of a toll on the runners was the polluted air.

Mota, who prefers to run in the heat, increased the pace slightly with about 10 miles remaining, but the 12 other runners who were bunched with her responded. Not until the pack left Yoido Island, Seoul’s version of Manhattan, and began to run alongside the bank of the Han River, did Mota and three others, Martin, Doerre and young Soviet Tatiana Polovinskaya pull away.

Those who have watched Mota run in recent years say that she looked uncharacteristically grim. They speculated that, while she was familiar with Martin and Doerre, she might have been concerned about the unexpected presence of Polovinskaya.

It was a surprise that the relatively unknown Polovinskaya, 23, was even among the three Soviet entries in the marathon. Nine other Soviets had faster times this year.

But with 3 miles remaining, Polovinskaya began to fall back. She eventually finished fourth in 2:27.04, just one-hundreth of a second ahead of China’s Zhao Youfeng.

Mota has won 9 of 12 marathons that she has entered since 1982, including five straight. She has won the Boston Marathon the last two years and is considered virtually unbeatable when she is at her best. Since winning in Boston in April, she has been training at high altitude in Boulder, Colo.

“Rosa is relentless,” Martin said.

She had to be in order to compete in sports in Portugal, which is not known for the support it gives women athletes. It was particularly difficult for her because she wanted to be a marathoner.

Pedrosa explained that Portugal’s most famous marathoner before Mota was Carlos Lopes, winner of the marathon at the L.A. Games and former world record-holder. But an even more vivid memory is that of Francisco Lazaro, who collapsed after the event at the 1912 Summer Olympics in Stockholm and later died.

After that, Pedrosa said that Portugese officials were convinced that the marathon was a torturous distance for runners and discouraged them from attempting it until they were near the end of their careers.

When Mota, at age 14, began running through the streets of her hometown, the fishing village of Foz do Douro, near Oporto, she was considered an oddity. In the ensuing years, she said that she had to learn to ignore insults from the other villagers.

“They said, ‘Go home, have babies, wash dishes,’ ” she said recently. “I kept running, but it made me feel bad. When people said those things, it also made me stronger.”