Lucia Stafford Wins the First Bloor Street Mile Faster Than She Ran at Worlds

Lucia Stafford had raced many of the best milers in the world in Copenhagen only a week earlier. Back in Toronto, she spotted the inaugural Bloor Street Mile on Instagram a few days before race day and signed up, and on Sunday morning the two-time Olympian ran 4:23 to take the women’s title, quicker on home roads than she had been at the World Road Running Championships.

Stafford made her road mile debut in Copenhagen on Sept. 19 and placed eighth in 4:29.51, with her sister Gabriela DeBues-Stafford right behind her in ninth, while France’s Agathe Guillemot won in a European record of 4:22.74. Stafford came away wanting more. “I did my first road mile and I thought, well, I got to do another. It was just too much fun,” she said in a post-race interview with the race.

At 28, she has run the 1,500m for Canada at two Olympics, in Tokyo and Paris, and finished fourth in the mile at the Commonwealth Games in Glasgow this summer. Trevor Painter and Jenny Meadows, who coach Olympic 800m champion Keely Hodgkinson, are also her coaches at M11 Track Club in Manchester, England. Her best for the mile is still the 4:22.72 she ran indoors at the 2023 Millrose Games, so Sunday’s road run came within a second of her lifetime best.

Her chip splits show how hard she started: 1:02 at 400m, 2:10 at 800m and 3:18 at 1,200m, before she covered the last 409m in about 65 seconds, quicker than either of her middle two laps. “We went out blazing. This course is fast. We went out in like 61 seconds,” Stafford said. “I actually ran six seconds faster here than I did at the World Road Championship. So it is fast.”

Organizer Pathfinder Events capped the first edition at 750 entrants and sent the field west along Bloor Street from Yonge Street, with the road cleared of cars and timing every 400m.

Only 10 of the 345 finishers beat Stafford to the line, all of them men, and she won the women’s race by 19 seconds from Sadie-Jane Hickson, second in 4:42. Sawyer Nicholson of Stouffville, Ont., was third in 4:47, nearly three years after she won the Niagara Falls 5K in 17:28 at age 11, a time that matched the world best for her age.

A group of six men went through 1,200m together in 3:12, and Ethan Davenport broke away from there to take the men’s title in 4:08. Liam Patterson finished second and Brandon Cidade third, both in 4:11. Erin Corrado was first in the non-binary category in 6:57, and 46 runners in all broke five minutes.

“I didn’t really know what to expect, but I just wanted to have fun,” Stafford said. “And I knew when the gun went off, the stubborn competitive instincts would kick in.”