Unit 9,Sport,recording25
The Empire State Building Run-Up is an annual race that has been organized since 1972. It’s widely known, not so much for its distance, which is about three hundred metres, as for the height differential. Each year, a selection of incredibly fit and fearless competitors gather to race up to the top of New York’s most famous skyscraper. They start in the lobby and go up all 1,576 steps, to the Observation Deck on the eighty-sixth floor. The first runner to the top wins.
In the year 2005 the male winner was Austrian Rudolf Reitberger, winning the closest race ever. For the last few metres he had run side-by-side with Thomas Dold, who lunged in vain at the finish, tumbling to the deck. They were both timed at ten minutes twenty-four seconds.
A year later, twenty-one-year-old Dold claimed his first tower-race victory, while Andrea Mayr of Austria won her third title in a row. ‘When youfinish first, it’s a feeling like you’re above the top of the world. It’s like flying,’ said twenty-six-year-old Mayr, who completed the race in eleven minutes twenty-three seconds, twenty-eight seconds better than the record she set last year.
Dold broke the tape in ten minutes nineteen seconds and erased the bitter disappointment of his defeat the year before. His decisive seventeen-second victory over Reitberger ended the Austrian’s two-year reign as champion. It also ended some frustration for Dold, who narrowly lost three of the six tower races he has run around the world. Dold said training back home for the race was difficult. ‘German skyscrapers are not as tall as in New York,’ he said.
Missing from the race was Chico Scimone of Sicily, the usual last-place finisher, who died in April at the age of ninety-three. It would have been his sixteenth appearance. A friend of his, fifty-seven-year-old Salvatore Ferrara, ran in the race in his honour.