Monday, September 25, 2006 - 04:45 PM

Daniel Rono doesn't do anything but win.

The smooth-running 28-year-old Kenyan withstood a late duel with Abderrahime Bouramdane of Morocco and pulled away in the final kilometre to smash the course record at the Scotiabank Toronto Waterfront Marathon yesterday.

It was the third marathon victory in as many races for Rono, who stepped up from the 10,000-metre track event in 2005. He also recently won at Madrid and Mumbai.

Rono posted his career best performance, 2 hours 10 minutes 15 seconds, the second fastest time in Canada after the Olympic win in 1976 of East German Waldemar Cierpinski, who was 20 seconds swifter over the 41.195-kilometre distance. Bouramdane clocked 2:10:41 and Peter Njoroge Muthama of Kenya was a distant third at 2:14:21.

Defending champion Simon Bor of Kenya, the former course record holder of 2:11:57, faded off the lead and placed sixth in 2:16:48. Danny Kassap, the Congolese-born 2004 champion, whose battle for refugee status made headlines in Canada, dropped out after the halfway mark after losing touch with the leaders.

Malgorzata Sobanska of Poland won the women's division in a course-record 2:34:32, well off her personal best but better than the previous standard, 2:36:20, set in 2003 by Lyubov Morgunova of Russia.

"He [Bouramdane] decided to come close to me and was almost pushing me," Rono said of some jostling at the 37-kilometre mark when the front runners took turns cutting in front of each other at the watering stations. "I knew after he pushed that I could win. I still had energy."

"He's a country boy, and sometimes the bigger Kenyan runners make fun of him, but he trained all summer to beat the likes of Bor and others who get invited to the Boston and Chicago marathons," race director Alan Brookes said. "He's a future star."

Rono, who trains at Kenya's famous running hotbed of Eldoret, received $15,000 for the victory and a $1,000 bonus for beating the 2:12 mark.

He just missed out on a $20,000 bonus that would have been his if he had erased the fastest time on Canadian soil.

Some confusion at the 28-kilometre turning point on the Leslie Street spit caused runners to cover about 80 metres more than the true course, but officials ruled that overshooting the turn didn't make the 20-second difference that would have given Rono the record.

For Bouramdane, it was an opportunity to show Canadians that he's "the real thing," after he was awarded first place in the Ottawa marathon this past summer.

In that race, 14 runners went astray and cut 400 metres off the course, finishing in front of the Moroccan.

He said he couldn't push the pace too much at the end of yesterday's race because of medical orders to protect an injured groin muscle and not to change rhythm.

Among other notable performances on a day when the course wound past bands and colourful street festivals:

Michal Kapral broke the three-hour mark for running a marathon while juggling three balls and expects his time of 2:57:53 to be inscribed in the Guinness Book of Records; and Ed Whitlock of Brampton, Ont., shattered an age-group world record for the over-75 set, finishing in 3:08:35, about 10 minutes faster than the previous mark of American runner Warren Utes. Whitlock holds the over-75 records for the mile, 3,000 metres, 5,000 metres, 10,000 metres and marathon.

One runner in the massive race field of 10,000 collapsed and received cardiopulmonary resuscitation treatment on the scene, but later died in hospital.

Meanwhile, in Berlin, at one of the world's largest marathons in Berlin, Haile Gebrselassie of Ethiopia ran the fastest time of the season, 2:05:56.

Paul Tergat of Kenya has the fastest time in history for the marathon, 2:04:55 on the same course in 2003. Five world records have been set in nine years on Berlin's streets.





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