President Way Kuo of City University of Hong Kong (CityU) led a team of around 500 athletes from the senior management team, faculty, staff, students and alumni at the Standard Chartered Hong Kong Marathon 2023 on 12 February.
He has led the CityU runners at 13 consecutive marathons in Hong Kong except in 2020 and 2022 when the races were cancelled due to COVID.
The 2023 marathon was significantly scaled down due to the pandemic. In the past, over 1,000 CityU athletes ran each annual marathon whereas this year only around 500 runners could sign up.
Altogether, 124 CityU runners took on the full marathon, while 177 and 243 joined the half marathon and 10-kilometre runs, respectively. Despite carrying an injury, President Way Kuo insisted on finishing the 10-kilometre run, demonstrating CityU’s resilience.
Dozens of staff, alumni, and students in the support team exemplified CityU’s spirit of unity by cheering on the runners throughout the day.
Under the leadership of President Kuo, CityU is one of the very few universities in Asia to advocate the spirit of excellence in academics, sports and music.
The world-class faculty at CityU is well recognised in international rankings such as those for academic citations, which place CityU first in Asia and Hong Kong. Additionally CityU was the first university in Hong Kong to introduce and practice the concept of One Health and has dominated sports in the tertiary education sector over the past 15 years, winning seven out of 12 Grand Slams in local university sports competitions.
The 2023 marathon was actually the last time that President Kuo would led the CityU marathon runners because he will retire as president in May.
He firmly believes life is like a marathon: “The distance of the journey doesn’t matter, but the lack of aspiration does.” True to this spirit, he encourages everyone at CityU to persevere whatever the challenge so that together we can scale new heights.
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