Hiroaki Chosa and Horst Milde share 2018 Lifetime Achievement Award

AIMS jointly honours two legends in the sport of distance running, Horst Milde & Hiroaki Chosa, with the annual Lifetime Achievement Award. Both have dedicated their lives to distance running and helped to open up the sport for people to enjoy all around the world.

Horst Milde will receive the AIMS Lifetime Achievement Award at the sixth annual AIMS ‘Best Marathon Runner’ Awards Gala to be held in the birthplace of the Marathon, Athens, on Friday 9 November while Hiroaki Chosa will receive the Award on a later occasion.

Hiroaki Chosa was President of AIMS between 1994 and 2010, the Association’s longest-serving president. He dedicated his life to helping people in Japan and internationally. An excellent athletics coach in his youth, he went on to be a director of global sport touching the lives of millions around the world.

He held many of the highest positions in the Japanese Association of Athletic Federations (JAAF) including Managing Director. He was Race Director of the famous Fukuoka Marathon and a member of the IAAF Cross Country and Road Running Committee and later the Road Running Commission. His diplomacy and the respect he is held in around the world forged meaningful and respectful connections between AIMS and the IAAF.

Mr. Chosa established links between AIMS and key global sponsors in Japan which helped AIMS to grow into the organisation it is today. He built a relationship between Unicef and AIMS. At the turn of the millennium AIMS ran a series of events in countries around the world each starting as the new millennium dawned. These events raised millions of Japanese Yen and American Dollars for good causes. The architect of the AIMS Millennium race series, touching and improving the lives of children around the world was Hiroaki Chosa. There can be few people in the history of world sport that can have touched more lives and made them better than Hiroaki Chosa.

Horst Milde founded the Berlin Marathon in 1974. Under his direction the race grew from a few hundred runners to more than 40,000. It became a sporting and cultural event of global significance. Horst made the Berlin Marathon a founding member of AIMS in 1982 and organised the 3rd World Congress of AIMS in Berlin in 1983. He was a member of the AIMS Board between 1999–2010.

In 1994 Horst founded the AIMS Marathon Museum of Running in Berlin’s historic Olympia Park, known as the Marathoneum. The museum documents the development of running and the marathon worldwide. Today it holds more than 100,000 artefacts. Horst has been the leading influence in ensuring the memory of the marathon and the sport of running is captured for all time within the AIMS Marathoneum.

Horst was a trailblazer and under his leadership the Berlin Marathon was the first in Europe to introduce chip timing in 1990. A clever and witty man (a baker by trade) and a great innovator, in 1996 Horst famously saved the day by baking a perfect replica of the sponsor’s shoe and presenting it in front of the world media to Uta Pippig when her world athlete of the year award arrived in Berlin broken.

Horst has passed the baton on to his son Mark Milde who is the Race Director of the Berlin Marathon.

AIMS President Paco Borao said: “AIMS would not be the world leading running organisation it is today without the hard work, dedication and talent of Hiroaki Chosa and Horst Milde. They are both very well deserving of the AIMS Lifetime Achievement Award. They are an inspiration to us all. I hope they will feel the warmth of gratitude of millions around the world whose lives they have touched and improved when they receive their awards.”