The Latest: Wheelchairs underway at 120th Boston Marathon

The Latest: Wheelchairs underway at 120th Boston Marathon

Updated Mar. 4, 2020 7:43 p.m. ET

BOSTON (AP) The Latest on Monday's 120th running of the Boston Marathon (all times local):

9:20 a.m.

The Boston Marathon just got a lot faster with the wheelchair division underway.

That division includes defending champions Marcel Hug, of Switzerland, and Tatyana McFadden, of the U.S.

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Both are crowd favorites looking to repeat their 2015 victories.

Thirty men and 15 women got off quickly on the downhill start in Hopkinton, Massachusetts.

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9:10 a.m.

Two people who lost limbs in the 2013 bombings at the Boston Marathon finish line are running this year's race.

Adrianne Haslet and Patrick Downes both lost legs in the attacks. Both are on their way from Hopkinton to Boston as part of the mobility-impaired division in Monday's 120th running of the venerable marathon.

Haslet is a professional ballroom dancer running to raise money and awareness for Limbs for Life, a charity that provides expensive prostheses to low-income amputees.

Both are running on special carbon-fiber blades.

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8:55 a.m.

The Boston Marathon is officially underway with the mobility-impaired athletes setting off.

About 50 participants with visual impairments and other disabilities are in Monday's race. They're being guided by able-bodied runners accompanying them along the 26.2-mile course.

The more competitive push rim wheelchair division sets off at 9:17 a.m., and the elite women go off at 9:32 a.m.

The elite men and the first of four waves of runners follow at 10 a.m.

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8:30 a.m.

With the top American marathoners resting for the Rio Olympics, Neely Spence Gracey could be the best U.S. hope for a podium finish in Boston on Monday.

Gracey, 26, of Superior, Colorado, is an eight-time NCAA Division II national champion who will be making her marathon debut.

But in a way, she has been a marathoner all her life.

Gracey is the daughter of 1991 world championship bronze medalist Steve Spence. Her father finished 19th - the No. 2 American overall - in the 1989 Boston Marathon, and Gracey was born on Patriots' Day in 1990 while her father was running the race.

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