Ria Van Landeghem
Belgian distance runner
Maria ("Ria") Van Landeghem (born 19 July 1957) is a senior grand masters level female long-distance runner from Belgium, who competed in road race and marathons. She represented her native country at the 1984 Summer Olympics, finishing in 21st place in the women's marathon. She was born in Sint-Niklaas, East Flanders.
Van Landeghem is a one-time winner (1984) of the Stockholm Marathon. Her personal best is 2:28:11, winning the Twin Cities Marathon in 1988. She won the Boilermaker 15K Race that year.
In 2019, she set the World Masters Athletics record for 60-64 women for the marathon, timing a 3:02:05 (gantry to gantry, not gun time) to defeat Joan Benoit Samuelson, who started ahead and had beaten van Landeghem by seven seconds on the gun time, but was 16 seconds slower on the net time (3:02:21), at the BMW Berlin Marathon.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Ria Van Landeghem” is belgian distance runner. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Landeghem, Belgian and distance, not as a finished interpretation.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated May 11, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q7322079. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1957, 1984, 1988 and 2019.
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This entry incorporates text from “Ria Van Landeghem” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.