German twins Anna and Lisa Hahner criticized for holding hands in Olympic marathon

German twin sisters Anna and Lisa Hahner have been criticized for how they finished the women’s marathon at the Rio Olympics last Sunday.

The Hahner sister crossed the finish line holding hands on Aug. 14. They finished the marathon in 81^st and 82^nd. After the race, German track and field officials accused the Hahner sisters of looking for publicity and treating the Olympic marathon “like a fun run.”

“Victory and medals are not the only goal,” Thomas Kurschilgen, sports director of the German Athletics Federation said in an email to the New York Times. “Still, every athlete in the Olympic competitions should be motivated to demonstrate his or her best performance and aim for the best possible result. Their main aim was to generate media attention. That is what we criticize.”

The twins maintain that they didn’t plan to end the marathon holding hands and they didn’t do it to make a political statement.

“In all the marathons we ran together before, there was a point in the race we had to split up,” Anna Hahner said in an email to the Times. “This was also the case in the Olympic marathon. I invested all I had and 300 meters before the finish line, I was next to Lisa. It was a magical moment that we could finish this marathon together. We did not think about what we were doing.”

Anna and Lisa also defended holding hands at the end of the marathon on Facebook saying, “81 and 82. Definitely not what we had hoped for. Are we satisfied? No. Crossing the finish line? Still one of our biggest sporting moments. For four years, we trained to our limit and went beyond that, too.”

North Korean twins Kim Hye-song and Kim Hye-gyong finished tenth and eleventh with an identical time of 2:28.36. There is no word yet on whether that is a coincidence or another conspiracy.