She Finished Olympic Marathon With a Broken Leg

British runner Rose Harvey finished 78th in the women's marathon at the Paris Olympics—a disappointing result when compared to her previous marathon times, but incredibly impressive for somebody running on a broken leg. In an Instagram post, Harvey shared a picture of herself on crutches, CNN reports. She said that she developed a "bit of tightness" in her hip a few weeks before the Sunday race but she and her team were "optimistic that with a bit of race day adrenaline, I would be able to run the race I knew I had in me." Instead, she wrote, she realized a couple of miles in that the next 24 miles would be a "painful battle." "It turns out I had stress fractured my femur," she wrote.

"It was really tough," the 31-year-old tells the BBC. "The hills didn't help at all, the downhills were just agony and it just got worse and worse." On Instagram, she said that if it was any other race, she would have stopped. But even though the race goals she had set for herself were out of reach, "there was still a tiny part of my Olympic dream that I could hang onto—and that was finishing the Olympic marathon. I couldn't give up." Harvey finished the marathon with a time of 2:51:03. CNN reports that she completed the 2023 Chicago Marathon in a time of 2:23:21—just 26 seconds slower than the Olympic record Dutch gold medalist Sifan Hassan set on Sunday.

"I kept telling myself to smile, soak up the energy of the incredible crowds and just put one foot in front of the other," Harvey said. Two runners—one from Nepal and one from Bhutan—finished behind Harvey. Another 11 didn't finish the marathon. Harvey took up running seriously when she was laid off from her job as a corporate lawyer early in the pandemic. She went pro in 2022. She says her next big challenge will be trying to get off crutches in time for her wedding in three weeks, though fiance Charlie Thuillier tells the BBC: "If Rosie is on crutches, if she's in a wheelchair, if she's on a scooter, it doesn't matter as long as Rosie is there." (More 2024 Paris Olympics stories.)