A new women's cham­pi­on will be crowned at the Uni­ver­si­ty of the West In­dies Sport and Phys­i­cal Ed­u­ca­tion Cen­tre (UWI SPEC) In­ter­na­tion­al Half Marathon to­mor­row morn­ing, start­ing at 5.30 am.

Last year's women's win­ner Tonya Nero yes­ter­day con­firmed that she will not be de­fend­ing her ti­tle at the 15th edi­tion of the race, which is be­ing spon­sored by First Cit­i­zens.

Nero, T&T's lead­ing women's dis­tance run­ner, who ran the Sco­tia­bank Toron­to Wa­ter­front Marathon in On­tario, Cana­da on the week­end, con­firmed that she will not run the 13.1-mile course.

"I will not be in Trinidad and I ran a marathon last week­end," said Nero. "I'm re­cu­per­at­ing now. On­ly train­ing for now un­til I de­cide to run an­oth­er race."

Mean­while, Rich­er Cobas Perez, a Mex­i­can-based Cuban, will be back to de­fend his ti­tle at the 15th edi­tion of the event. Perez, who ran a new record time of 1:06.22, last year, will be go­ing up against the Venezue­lan pair of Pe­dro Mo­ra and Didi­mo Sanchez, Kenya’s Jairus Chanchi­ma and Guyana’s Kelvin John­son.

Among the lo­cal men par­tic­i­pat­ing are Matthew Ha­gley, Cur­tis Cox, who fin­ished fourth and fifth last year, Shir­van Ba­boolal, An­tho­ny Phillip, George Smith, Richard Jones, Elvis Turn­er, Keanu Otero and Nicholas Ro­many.

In the women's cat­e­go­ry, T&T will be rep­re­sent­ed by Ce­line Lestrade, Sjae­lan Evans, Saman­tha Shuk­la, Do­minique Mar­tineau, Zi­nara Les­ley and Chan­tal Le Maitre.

St Mar­tin’s Ce­cil­ia Mobu­chon, who was the fourth-place fin­ish­er last year, will race as well as Colom­bia’s Raquel Agude­lo, Venezuela’s Zuleima Amaya and Nu­bia Ar­pon and Kenya’s Pu­ri­ty Cheromei.

The race will be­gin at UWI SPEC in St Au­gus­tine, con­tin­ue along the se­cured, traf­fic free, Pri­or­i­ty Bus Route to the La Re­source junc­tion in D’Abadie, be­fore dou­bling back to the UWI SPEC. The course will be com­plete with mark­ers and wa­ter stops at every mile for the run­ning con­ve­nience of the ath­letes from around the world in­clud­ing the Caribbean, USA, Latin Amer­i­ca and Eu­rope.

Some 1500 lo­cal, re­gion­al and in­ter­na­tion­al ath­letes will com­pete for over $150,000 in cash prizes and ham­pers, in­clud­ing spe­cif­ic cat­e­gories for UWI stu­dents and staff, Uni­ver­si­ty Stu­dents and wheel­chair as well as phys­i­cal­ly chal­lenged com­peti­tors. Par­tic­i­pants from as young as 15-19 age-group to 80 and over, prizes will be dis­trib­uted in men's and women's cat­e­gories rang­ing from TT$500 to TT$1000. The grand prize of Open In­ter­na­tion­al men's or women's takes home a grand to­tal of US$2,000.

Min­is­ter of Sport and Youth Af­fairs Sham­fa Cud­joe, UWI chan­cel­lor Robert Bermudez and First Cit­i­zens Deputy CEO of Busi­ness Gen­er­a­tion Ja­son Julien are al­so ex­pect­ed to com­pete in to­mor­row’s race.

This year’s edi­tion sup­ports the cause of men­tal health and pro­ceeds will be con­tributed to Child­Line and Life­line. Re­lay teams of four per­sons were al­lowed to reg­is­ter to com­plete the 13.1-mile race, which will be­gin at 6.15 am.