Name Dan Robinson Role Olympic athlete | Height 1.63 m | |
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Daniel ("Dan") Stephen Robinson (born 13 January 1975 in Cheltenham) is an English long-distance runner who specialises in the marathon. He represented Great Britain in the marathon at the 2004 Athens Olympics and the 2008 Beijing Games.
He won the bronze medal in the marathon race at the 2006 Commonwealth Games. However, David Bedford (director of the London Marathon) criticised male British runners for not training hard enough and falling behind their foreign counterparts. Robinson disputed this claim, saying that motivation was not a key problem, but rather that training methods could be deficient or that past generations of runners were simply more talented than his generation. Robinson finished 16th in the marathon at the 2006 European Athletics Championships. In 2007 he was within the top ten at the London Marathon and was eleventh in the 2007 World Championship Marathon later that year.
He ran at the 2009 Great North Run and was the first British man to finish, taking twelfth place. He set a marathon personal best at the 2009 Amsterdam Marathon, recorded a time of 2:12:14 and finishing eleventh. At the 2010 London Marathon, he had to drop out mid-race due to a calf injury. However, remained confident of running at both the 2010 European Athletics Championships and 2010 Commonwealth Games, which he had achieved the qualifying times for.