On November 17, the 2024 Kayou Yiwu Half Marathon started at the Yiwu Meihu Sports Center. 20,000 participants from 21 countries and regions including China, Colombia, Jordan, and the United States started their competition in Yiwu, and jointly opened a new journey on the New Silk Road.
This year’s marathon is still the same as in previous years, divided into three types: half marathon (20KM), mini fitness run (8KM) and parent-child fitness run (3KM). Wingtu Group has athletes and volunteers who love running voluntarily sign up every year. In this year’s marathon, some colleagues brought their children to participate in the parent-child run.
Marathon medals are also another cultural carrier. This year’s medal features painted pottery elements from the Qiaotou site in Yiwu dating back 9,000 years. It is also inspired by Yiwu’s unique trading model of “exchanging chicken feathers for sugar”. It has experienced the glorious rise of an international trade city, and the China-Europe Express has roared across the Eurasian continent, vividly demonstrating Yiwu’s extraordinary leap from a rural market to a global trade hub.
More than 40 years ago, Yiwu was still in a state of poverty with “seven lights on one road and one horn ringing the whole city”. In 1982, Yiwu carried forward the local business spirit and proposed the development strategy of “promoting business and building the city”. In that era when taboos still existed, Yiwu took the lead in breaking through the barriers. The hawking of “exchanging chicken feathers for sugar” opened the precedent for Yiwu merchants. People from all over the world gathered in Yiwu, and also started the marathon journey of economic take-off.
The blending and dissemination of passion, friendship, and happiness, the tenacity and perseverance of runners, these spiritual cores of the marathon are precisely the unique temperament of the city of Yiwu, and also demonstrate the profound value of cultural heritage. From the moment the starting gun sounds through the sky to the moment the last athlete crosses the finish line, the marathon event is short, but the perseverance, striving for excellence, passionate belief and happy sharing contained therein have been deeply imprinted in people’s hearts, turning into a source of power for Yiwu to keep moving forward and move towards the world.
