The city of San Francisco isn’t called “City of Champions” for nothing. The US West Coast metropolis with 800,000 citizens that is the home to the Baseball Giants and the American Football 49ers currently holds the two most meaningful championship titles in US sports. The world champions of the JP Morgan Chase Corporate Challenge Series, with races held in 13 countries, competed there on 9 September 2015.
In 2014 in Frankfurt, the Memmert runners Sebastian Reinwand, Joseph Katib, Andreas Straßner and Michael Batz had qualified for the grand final from out of 80,000 competitors. In San Francisco, they started the race as the "underdogs" of a medium-sized family company with a healthy dose of respect. After all, numerous teams had a hard time trying to dethrone Transnet Engineering in past years. The company from South Africa had held the title for about eight years. With an excellent team performance, our four running aces surprised everyone that day and relegated the seemingly invincible rival to second place and can now officially call themselves Corporate Challenge World Champions. The excellent team result of 1:02:57 h was a clear 2.18-minute lead.
Sebastian Reinwand set the stage for the victory and also proudly won the overall victory in the individual ranking for Memmert. Only three days after the German Championships in the 10km street race, this was not an easy feat for him to pull off. All the 5.3 kilometres up and down the Fisherman’s Wharf, he ran side by side with the Australian Olympian and marathon runner Martin Dent. Only in the thrilling final spurt in front of the legendary Giants stadium, Reinwand eventually was one step ahead of his rival. It was such a close run that the winner could only be determined with the finish photo. Joseph Katib and Andreas Straßner, ranking place four and five, let only one runner pass them, and Michael Batz finished the race 15th despite his bad calf and contributed to the team’s success.
We congratulate the winners and are delighted by the great result.
