MANCHESTER, Conn. — Two former runners and champions of the Manchester Road Race (MRR) will return for the 2021 race, officials announced Wednesday.
Sam Chelanga, winner of the 2013 MRR, and Edna Kiplagat, who won the women's title at the 2019 race, will return this year.
They are not the only elite runners joining the race this year.
“Our elite runner coordinator, Jim Harvey, has done a brilliant job of assembling excellent fields of elite runners for our return to Main Street and the celebration of our 85th Manchester Road Race this year,” said Dr. Tris Carta, President of the road race committee. “It is going to be a very exciting road race."
Other world-class male athletes who have entered this year’s 4.748-mile Turkey Trot include Ben Flanagan, who won the Falmouth Road Race in August and finished eighth at the 2019 MRR; Drew Hunter, the 2019 USA indoor two-mile champion who won the national 5K road championship in New York City on Nov. 6; and Olympian Donn Cabral, who was second at the 2015 MRR and has had seven top-10 finishes in Manchester.
Cabral, a graduate of Glastonbury High School who was the NCAA champion in the steeplechase when he competed for Princeton, was the fastest runner (23:00) in last November’s Virtual Manchester Road Race.
Weini Kelati, who won the women’s national 5K road championship in New York City on Nov 6th with a time of 15:18, and Monicah Ngige, the fourth-place finisher at this year’s Boston Marathon who had a fourth-place finish here in 2018 (25:02), are also expected to make strong showings in the women’s race.
Tune in at 9 a.m. on Thanksgiving Day for FOX61's full coverage of the Manchester Road Race. The race will be broadcast live on FOX61, fox61.com, FOX61's news, ROKU and Amazon FireTV apps, and on FOX61’s YouTube page.
The two-hour show will be re-broadcast on CW20 at 4 p.m. on Thanksgiving Day.
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