Sunday, 25 July 2010-Bogota, Colombia – The world’s fastest and most successful Half Marathon runner, Zersenay Tadese of Eritrea, will lead the field at the 2010 Bogota International Half Marathon, an IAAF Gold Label Road Race, on 1 August in Bogota, Colombia.

Tadese set the World Half Harathon record of 58:23 in winning the Lisbon Half Marathon in March this year, and also set a new World 20 km record en route to that finish.  He took 10 seconds off the record previously held by Olympic Marathon champion Samuel Wanjiru of Kenya.  Tadese is undefeated in four consecutive years of the IAAF Half Marathon and World Road Running Championships, capturing the 20 km title in Debrecen, Hungary, in 2006, and the Half Marathon title in Udine, Italy, in 2007, Rio de Janeiro in 2008 and Birmingham, England in 2009.

Tadese was born in 1982 in Adi Bana, Eritrea and has six siblings.  In his teenage years he pursued a career in professional cycling, but a win in a local race in 2001 propelled the then 19-year-old into a running career that has brought him medals on three different surfaces – Track, cross country and road.

On the track, Tadese has an Olympic bronze medal (10,000m, 2004) and an IAAF World Athletics Championships silver medal (10,000m, 2009). In Cross Country he has seven individual medals – four bronze, two silver and one gold from 2007 in Mombasa, Kenya. And on the roads he has the four consecutive individual gold medals.

The Bogota Half Marathon, an IAAF Gold Label Event, will challenge him with the city’s 2600m elevation, and a strong international field led by four-time champion Isaac Macharia of Kenya, whose wins includes the last three years in a row.

Organisers for the IAAF