WASHINGTON, October 14 (RIA Novosti) – Russian-born Tatyana McFadden has become the first person ever to win three consecutive major marathons, powering through pain at the 20th mile in the Chicago Marathon to set a course record in the women’s wheelchair race.
‘‘I didn’t know if I would be able to stay on top,’’ McFadden, who was adopted by her American mother from a Russian orphanage when she was 6 years old, told the Chicago Sun-Times after Sunday’s race. ‘‘From there, I went on muscle memory.’’
McFadden, 24, finished the race in 1:42:22, setting a course record and narrowly beating Swiss racer Manuela Schaer by less than three seconds.
She became the first able-bodied or disabled athlete to capture the Boston, London and Chicago Marathons in the same year and is looking to add a victory at the New York City Marathon to that list next month.
McFadden was born in St. Petersburg – then Leningrad – with an underdeveloped spinal cord and spina bifida, which causes paralysis of the lower body, and spent the early years of her life in a Russian orphanage.
She was adopted and brought to the United States at the age of six, and after suffering from anemia and being grossly underweight; she was enrolled in sports programs by her adoptive mother, Debbie McFadden of Clarksville, Maryland.
McFadden made her international competitive debut at the age of 15 as the youngest member of the US track and field team at the Athens Paralympic Games, where she won a silver medal in the 100 meters and bronze in the 200 meters races.
Four years later at the Beijing Paralympic Games, McFadden won three silver medals, in the 200, 400 and 800 meter races, and bronze in the 4x100 meter relay. At the London Paralympic Games last year, she captured gold medals in the 400, 800 and 1,500 meter races.
After the New York City Marathon next month, McFadden will begin training to make the US cross-country skiing team for the 2014 Winter Paralympics in Sochi, the Chicago Tribune reported.
McFadden has been a vocal critic of a Russian law enacted last year that bans US citizens from adopting Russian children, saying her success story would not have been possible if such a statute had been in place when she was a child.
The ban came just days after US President Barack Obama signed the controversial Magnitsky Act – a US law sanctioning Russians deemed by Washington to have violated human rights.
A spokesman for President Vladimir Putin said the Magnitsky Act had triggered the adoption ban, but reports of sometimes fatal abuse and neglect of Russian adoptees in the United States sparked widespread public outrage in Russia in the years before the ban as well.
