The Egyptian capital has hosted its Second Zayed Charity Marathon. At least 30,000 Egyptians came to Cairo from across the country, to help raise awareness about liver diseases.
It was dawn; the coldest time of the day here in Cairo. Most of the country was still asleep, yet scores showed any way to join the Zayed Charity Marathon. And they have come from all governorships to join the biggest running event in the year.
” We have a registration system, we started very early for this one. And we figured out that if we open without control that there will be more than 100 thousand, but we stopped the registration. So Today we are going to see something huge. A nice lifestyle for sport, I could call it Egypt practice sports today.” Ashraf Sobhy,
Deputy Sports Minister
More than 30 thousand runners have registered, most of them are not athletes. They thrive on helping others, so they came to join this sports awareness campaigns about liver Diseases.
The Marathon is named after Sheikh Zayed Al Maktoum the founder of the United Arab Emirates. It’s the second time the event gets held in Cairo. A total 125,000 US dollars financial prizes was distributed for the top 250 runners, with the first winning just 2500 US dollars. After the event sponsors will start raising money to fund liver disease centers in Egypt, the country has the highest infection rates on hepatitis C in the world.
Non of the runners were there for the prizes because basically it’s very small, also most of them are not athletes, but Al Zayed Marathon has shown that there are tens of thousands of Egyptians who are willing to exert a lot of effort to help their country.
