Molina’s Long Run Ends With a Sprint to Victory

The Los Angeles Marathon put up about 70 runners in local hotels, paid for about 50 of them to fly to the city and got Sunday’s winner for the price of a phone call.

Jose Luis Molina got into the race on Friday after a bit of confusion with his manager, then left all but aspiring American Alfredo Vigueras behind at the 20th mile and cruised across the finish line at the Los Angeles Central Library in 2 hours 13 minutes 23 seconds.

Vigueras was three seconds behind in the closest Los Angeles finish ever.

Lyubov Klochko of Ukraine won the women’s race in 2:30:30, 4:25 ahead of Lucia Rendon of Mexico.

Klochko and Molina earned $15,000 and a car for their efforts, but Klochko will net more than Molina, who had to pay his way from Costa Rica, about $700, to run. Upon arriving, he enlisted help from the Costa Rican consul-general, who lined him up with a place to stay in Arleta. Molina then picked up No. 77. The men’s elite runner roster stopped at 38.

“But when I dropped out, he gave me a thumbs up like he was in complete control,” said Eddy Hellebuyck, who ran 16 miles then decided to save the rest of his energy for the Boston Marathon because those miles weren’t run fast enough to get him on the Belgian Olympic team. “I knew he was running a good one.”

His best one, actually, by more than five minutes and the best marathon ever by a Costa Rican runner. “They told me they wanted to see me run a 2:16,” Molina said. “Nobody in Costa Rica can run a 2:16.”

It got Molina on his country’s Olympic team and, presumably, as the best marathon runner in Costa Rica, he won’t have to pay his way to Atlanta.

He ran with a 12-runner pack through the early part of Sunday’s race, with Salvador Para being paid as the field’s “rabbit” to set a 1:05:30 pace.

Juma Ikangaa, wearing No. 1 because he had the fastest personal best in the field, a 2:08:01 run in 1989 in New York, led through the first mile, dropped back and eventually staggered home 24th in 2:31:19 after having been ignominiously passed by Klochko in the 20th mile.

Ikangaa, a three-time Olympian trying to get a time that would allow him to represent Tanzania again in Atlanta, was the first of the elite runners to drop back. He was joined by several, including Joseildo Rocha, the 1993 men’s winner who finished 15th Sunday; Peter Fleming of Scotland, who did 20 miles; and Peter Fonseca, of Canada, who didn’t do much more.

In many cases, they had completed enough of their contracts with the marathon to make it financially worth their while and enough miles on the course to consider it a good training run.

Molina dropped back about 100 yards from the lead pack to take a look, and then decided to press his case on some hills in the 21st mile.

“I like running up hills,” he said.

By then, he was chasing Vigueras, who is from Hildago, Mexico, but living in San Antonio and training with Arturo Barrios in Las Cruces, N.M., while waiting out a March 28 citizenship date.

Vigueras had broken away and staved off several challenges from runners who, seeing they were beaten, gave up.

Not Molina.

The two dueled for two miles, and then Molina took over, stretching his lead to 10 yards or more, losing part of it, then stretching it out again. The certainty of the outcome depended on the viewpoint.

Molina knew he had won “with two miles to go,” he said.

“I knew I had lost with 500 meters to go,” said Vigueras, who ran those last 500 meters gritting his teeth.

The women’s race carried no such drama.

The event started at Eighth and Figueroa in downtown Los Angeles, and by Ninth Street, Klochko had won the race for the second time.

She needed to finish eighth or better and run 2:35 or better to make Ukraine’s Olympic team, and had no trouble doing both. Her pace, early on, equated to a 2:23 race, and there have been only five women’s marathons run that fast in history.

She quickly learned that it was ridiculous to try to make it six.

“I was waiting and waiting, and nobody ever came up,” she said.

Instead, she tacked onto the pace of two men wearing Guatemalan colors. Her lead was one minute at five miles, two minutes at 10 and the race from there was for second place, won by Rendon, who made Mexico’s Olympic qualifying time by five seconds and must sweat out efforts by others in Boston and Rotterdam to find out if she will go to Atlanta.

Klochko goes back to Gainesville, Fla., where New Yorkers and Ukranian marathon runners spend their winters. She trains there with 1992 Olympic gold medal winner Valentina Yeregova.

There could be trouble in Florida. It seems Klochko gave the Mercedes she got for winning the 1993 Los Angeles Marathon to her coach, Anatoly Streletz, and it’s snowbound in Ukraine.

“I need a car for Gainesville,” Streletz said, smiling.

Socialism is over in Ukraine and certainly in Florida.

“I’m keeping the car,” Klochko said.

The $25,000 course-record bonus went unpaid, and there was some question in the minds of several of the runners if Martin Mondragon’s 2:10:19, set in 1989, would be eclipsed on the new course, which is the reverse of the old.

“It has the hills in the wrong place,” Hellebuyck said. “At about the time you get tired, 22 or 23 miles, there are the hills. You need more downhill to the finish line than that.”

Unless you are Molina, who raced uphill fastest of all Sunday and earned more than enough for plane fare back to Costa Rica.