In Brief : Olympians Honored as Top Runners

Olympic champions John Ngugi of Kenya and Rosa Mota of Portugal were named today as 1988 Runners of the Year by Runner’s World magazine.

Ed Eyestone of Orem, Utah, and Kim Gallagher of El Segundo won honors as U.S. Runners of the Year in the magazine’s February issue.

Ngugi, 26, won the Olympic 5,000 meters at Seoul and for the third consecutive year won the World Cross-Country Championships, last March at Auckland, New Zealand.

Mota, 30, won the Olympic marathon, her seventh-straight marathon victory, and became the first woman to score back-to-back wins in the Boston Marathon.

Jane Welzel, of Durham, N.H., won Comeback Runner of the Year honors. Welzel, left with nine broken vertebrae in a December, 1984, car accident seven months after finishing 14th in the first U.S. Olympic women’s marathon trials, resumed running and racing within a year and last March finished 13th in the 1988 Olympic marathon trials.

Masters Runner of the Year winners were Bill Rodgers, 40, of Sherburn, Mass., and Laurie Binder, 43, of Oakland.