Raúl Criado and María Teresa La Chica, in the Marathon and Luca del Pero and Maude Mathys, in the Half Marathon, complete the places of honor of a very special anniversary of the Isla Bonita race.
Transvulcania adidas TERREX lived today another edition for the history of mountain races. The race on the island of La Palma, which reached its fifteenth birthday, lived a day of maximum emotions and enormous spectacle in all its competitive distances where Peter Frano and Anne-Lise Rousset were crowned as winners of the ultra marathon.
In a day destined to the epic, with hard conditions of rain and wind, with very cold in some points of the route and changing temperatures, Frano and Rousset were the best of this special anniversary of the race. The Slovakian rider lived a real sporting battle with Andreas Reiterer, who started with a significant advantage that the Italian managed to reduce to the point of passing him on the descent to Tazacorte.
Once he reached the Puerto de Tazacorte, Frano, who never lost sight of Reiterer, launched an attack from the asphalt when the terrain began to climb again, to which the transalpine could no longer respond. The Slovak, without looking behind, reached the finish line alone to win with a time of 6h.55:36 with Reiterer coming in second (6h.58:27) and Manu Anguita reaching the third step of the podium (7h.19:18).
Anne-Lise Rousset did not allow Ruth Croft to revalidate her 2024 triumph. The French runner showed a brutal performance in very tough conditions to achieve a Transvulcania adidas TERREX triumph she had been chasing for a long time. Rousset had already finished second in 2016 and 2017 behind Ida Nilsson and also in 2019, behind Ragna Debats.
The Gallic athlete achieved an emotional triumph in a race with which she had a pending debt. Her dominance was not from start to finish because she met with the initial resistance of Ruth Croft with whom she was until the area of El Reventón. There Rousset went up and Croft was declining to the point that the New Zealander was surpassed by runners like Ekaterina Mityaeva and Martina Valmassois, among others.
Rousset maintained her good pace to enter the finish line with a time of 8h.18:17 to achieve her first victory in Transvulcania adidas TERREX and then announce that this would be her last season as a runner. The podium was completed by Ekaterina Mityaeva (8h.36:58) and Martina Valmassoi (8h.37:25) who starred in a thrilling finish.
MARATHON
In the Marathon distance it was Raúl Criado and Maria Teresa La Chica who achieved an epic triumph with a record of the race for the athlete from Seville and an exhibition of power of the young athlete from Barcelona.
Criado was part of an initial group with Tobias Baggentos and Andrea Prandi, among others, and gradually set a hard pace that increased on the descent from the tower of -El Time making the distance insurmountable for his pursuers. The winner used a final time of 3h.43:43, new record of the distance and was ahead of Baggentos in 1:44 minutes. Third was Prandi himself (3h.48:19).
The big surprise of this edition of Transvulcania adidas TERREX was given by María Teresa La Chica who broke any prediction to win with a time of 4h.29:19, seven minutes and one second less than Sheila Avilés (4h.36:20). The podium was completed by Inés Astraín (4h.47:26).
HALF MARATHON
Luca del Pero and Maude Mathys did a double in this edition of Transvulcania adidas TERREX. Del Pero and Mathys, who had already won the Vertical Climb on Thursday, also won the Half Marathon where they imposed their dominance with a course record for both of them.
The transalpine runner went out true to his style, with everything, and soon a selection was made at the head of the race where only Sergio Alvarez, Daniel Osanz, Baptiste Massot and Lucas Clocher resisted. Del Pero and Álvarez overcame the resistance of the other rivals to play for the win and it was Del Pero the most consistent (2h.11:19) with 12 seconds ahead of Álvarez from Tenerife. Daniel Osanz finished third (2h.12:32).
As in the Vertical Climb, Maude Mathys was convincing among the women in this Half Marathon distance. The Swiss was a hammer from the start to break the best historical record of the race and stop the stopwatch in 2h.37:20, 11 minutes and a half less than Alba Valladares, who was second (2h.48:50). The third step on the podium was taken by Silvia Lara (2h.49:31). Local Moana Lilly Kehres finished fourth (2h.49:35).
The president of the Cabildo Insular de La Palma, Sergio Rodríguez, emphasized that “this has surely been one of the hardest Transvulcanias in history and has continued to overcome the frontier of human effort and to reach challenges that remain very difficult to overcome for future editions”.
“Once again it has become clear that the island of La Palma and the Transvulcania adidas TERREX are the union of efforts of runners, volunteer groups and institutions that, together with the public of the island and those who already know the appeal of this race and come from other points, make all participants help to make it even better,” confessed Sergio Rodriguez, who praised the “enormous effort” in terms of security to “ensure that all points were covered and the attention to all runners in case of a possible emergency”.
The Transvulcania adidas TERREX is organised by the Cabildo Insular de La Palma through the public company SODEPAL, with the support of the Government of the Canary Islands, through the Department of Tourism and Promotur with its brand ‘Islas Canarias Latitud de Vida’, as well as the companies 226ERS, Hotel H10 Taburiente Playa, Hotel La Palma Princess, Hotel Meliá La Palma, Fred. Olsen Express, Cicar, Spar La Palma, Coca-Cola, Libbys and Isola.
