Gashau Ayale ran himself into an individual bronze medal at the European Athletics Championships in Birmingham on Sunday, and then watched two of his teammates confirm the biggest prize of all: gold in the men's marathon team competition.
The race went to Germany's Amanal Petros, who broke the championship record to win outright in 2:09:11, with Italy's Pietro Riva taking silver ten seconds back. Ayale, 29, crossed third in 2:09:21, just ten seconds off the winner and enough to claim the individual bronze.
"It was a difficult race, but the end was good," Ayale said afterwards, according to ONE. "I was relatively behind during the race, but I reached 37km at a good pace and saw their third runner was exhausted, so I identified the opportunity to attack them."
That late move mattered far beyond his own medal. The team result is decided by combining each nation's three fastest finishers, and Ayale's teammates Tadesse Getahon and Haimro Alame came home fifth (2:09:31) and eighth (2:09:45) respectively, giving Israel a combined time of 6:28:37.
Germany's next two scorers, Samuel Fitwi Sibhatu (ninth, 2:09:47) and Richard Ringer (tenth, 2:10:05), left the defending favourites with a cumulative 6:29:03 — 26 seconds slower than Israel, and enough to hand the team title to the Israeli trio.
"This is a huge achievement to win in such a race," Ayale said. "There is great satisfaction here."
Itai Magidi, the professional director overseeing Israel's long-distance running programme, credited the squad's depth for the result. "Fortunately we have depth in the team, so both Tadese Getahun and Aymero Alemayahu managed to bring the team gold at the finish," he said, using the Hebrew-transliterated spellings of Getahon and Alame's names, per ONE.
ONE reports the win extends Israel's run to three straight team golds at the European Athletics Championships, underlining how the country's marathon programme — built largely around Ethiopian-born runners who moved to Israel — has become one of the continent's strongest.
Ayale himself was born in Gojam, Ethiopia, in 1996 to a Beta Israel family and immigrated to Israel at 13, taking up competitive running only at 18. He already holds the Israeli marathon record at 2:04:53, set in Seville in 2024, and won individual bronze at the 2022 European Championships in Munich before finishing 31st at the Paris Olympics in 2024.
Sunday's result gives him a second European Championships medal to go with that Munich bronze, and adds another team gold to an Israeli distance-running group that has quietly built one of the country's most consistent recent success stories in Olympic sport.
