Parents proud of Olympic heroine

9:28am Tuesday 19th August 2008

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Mara Yamauchi, the Oxford woman who matched the best finish for a Briton in the Olympic marathon, was only five when she fell in love with the Games.

Her proud father Norman Myers recalls catching her standing on a coffee table imagining she was receiving an Olympic medal.

Three decades later, while missing out on a medal, she came sixth in the marathon in Beijing on Sunday.

Dr Myers, from Headington, said: "I remember Mara being very young and she was fascinated by the Olympics.

"She sat all day watching events like the archery and swimming. She would be particularly interested in the medal ceremonies.

"I said to her, 'if you're keen on taking part one day, you will have to practise standing on a box and waving to the crowd'.

"The next morning, I came downstairs and she was standing on the coffee table waving to the crowd."

After initially excelling at swimming, Mrs Yamauchi, 35, who lives in Tokyo with her Japanese husband, turned to running, aged 15.

Dr Myers, 73, said: "One sports day at school, the first race was 800m and she won that easily. The next one was the mile, two hours later, and she won that easily.

"Then they announced there would be an open one-mile race. Although she had already done two long races that day, she took part and won that easily too.

"That was the first indication that she had potential for running."

Dr Myers, an honorary visiting fellow of Green College, has completed 32 marathons himself, after entering his first one in Abingdon aged 50. He finished in 2hr 59min and went on to complete another 11 events in under 2hr 45min.

In 1963, while living in Kenya, he scaled Mount Kilimanjaro in a then-record time of 13hr 38min for the 46-mile slog, despite a 45-minute halt to pick flowers.

After watching the marathon on TV in the early hours of Sunday, Dr Myers rang his daughter in Beijing.

He said: "She was very pleased with what she had done, especially having enough to outsprint the Russian woman at the end."

"I felt delight and very great pleasure for Mara. I could hardly believe that there stands my daughter doing those interviews to the whole world and she had run faster than any other British woman at the Olympics.

"She has a great physiological capacity, but also great mental capacity. She's the most competitive runner I have ever met. If I ever found she was on my shoulder, with a mile to run, I would dread that. She would grind me into the ground."

Her mother Dorothy, who also lives in Oxford but is divorced from Dr Myers, added: "We're extremely proud of her and absolutely delighted with what she has achieved after putting in consistently hard work.

"She hasn't really had the recognition she probably deserves, but that can be a mixed blessing."

• An Oxford-born former pupil at Oxford High School and student at St Anne's College, Mara began running seriously with Headington Road Runners while still at school.

She captained the university's women's cross-country team and won the English cross country title in 1998.

Closer to home, she was the first woman finisher in Oxford's Town and Gown Run in 2003 - beating all but six men to the finish - and was the women's winner at the Blenheim 10k in 2004.

Her personal best time in the marathon, set in the Osaka Marathon in January, is 2hr, 25min, 10sec - making her the second fastest British woman in history over 26.2 miles, behind world record holder Paula Radcliffe.

She spent part of her build-up to the Olympics at St Moritz in the Swiss Alps, running on a treadmill in a specially-sealed room, with kettles boiling off steam to replicate the humid conditions in Beijing.

She is named after the Mara River in Kenya, where her family lived until she was eight.