Deaf runner dies in ultramarathon disaster
On Saturday afternoon, there was a terrible tragedy in China when 21 runners died in extreme weather during an ultramarathon race through mountainous terrain.
According to news reports, one of the runners was a deaf man named Huang Guanjun, who won a Paralympic Games marathon competition in China in 2019.
This is the only picture I could find of Huang online, but his face is blurred here.
What happened? There were 172 runners who were in the middle of a 62-mile race in an area called the Yellow River Stone Forest. Sometime between the 12th and the 19th mile areas, there was a hailstorm, freezing rain, strong winds, and a steep temperature drop. Many runners only had thin shirts and shorts on, so they were overwhelmed.
One of the runners who survived, Zhang Xiaotao, wrote in a blog that the race started at 9:00 am and that the wind was strong enough to blow off some of the runners’ hats. He said things felt normal for the first 20 kilometers. He said when the course started to go uphill, conditions became worse with hail plummeting his face and blurring his vision. He said he was in the front of the pack and ran past Huang (the deaf man) and greeted him, but he pointed to his ears and waved to indicate that he was deaf. Zhang said as he continued up the mountain in the bad weather, he started to lose control over his limbs and fell down and couldn’t get back up. He said he covered himself with a blanket and pressed a SOS button on his GPS tracker and then passed out. He said a sheepherder found him and carried him to a cave where he made a fire and warmed him up. He woke up and saw there were other runners and they all were able to reach the bottom of the mountain to safety, but was saddened to find out that other runners including Huang died.
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BBC said Huang was 34. He became deaf at the age of one and in his adult life, struggled to hold a permanent job and competed in races to win prize money. A friend of Huang said they cried at the thought of him dying in his final moments, because he was deaf and couldn’t speak, and couldn’t even call for help.
News reports said emergency workers struggled in the rough terrain to find and rescue the runners. There were about 1,200 emergency workers. Many runners had hypothermia.
There is an investigation on what more the race organizers could have done to prevent the tragedy. There were weather warnings about extreme weather on the day of the race.
https://min.news/en/sport/0c225345a69d472a44e6d066e540fd77.html