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Unlike many top marathon runners, Hwang Young-cho did not progress to
the marathon relatively late in his career after establishing a sound
grounding in track competition. This was not to say that Hwang hadn't
competed on the track. He had shown promise as a junior at 5,000m and
10,000m and had won the 10,000m at the 1991 Asian Championships in 29min
50.37sec. However, once he started competing in marathons, he quickly
saw that his future as a distance runner was more promising on the road
than on the track. Hwang made an impressive marathon debut, winning the
1991 Seoul International marathon in 2hr 12min 35sec only five days
short of his twenty-first birthday. Later that year, on 21 July, he
also won the second marathon in which he competed, at the World
University Games in Sheffield, in a time of 2hr 12min 40sec.
From 1992
onwards, Hwang concentrated solely on the marathon, and on 2 February
1992, he reduced his personal best to 2hr 08min 47sec when he finished
second at the Beppu marathon. In the Barcleona Olympic marathon held on
9 August that year, Hwang was in the leading pack from the start, but
in a slowly run race, this group still numbered thirty runners at the
halfway mark. However, runners gradually lost contact with the leaders
in the second half of the race, until at 35km, only Hwang and Koichi
Morishita (Japan) remained. These two waged a memorable struggle over
the final stages, until Hwang broke away just after 40km and continued
on to win the gold medal (see photo above) in 2hr 13min 23sec in only
the fourth marathon of his career. Hwang raced sparingly after
Barcelona, and he retired after injury prevented him from gaining a
place on the 1996 Korean Olympic team. (Ron Casey)
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