Richard Nerurkar sets the scene as the legendary Ethiopian runner prepares to tackle the Olympic marathon in Paris on Saturday
I first crossed paths with Kenenisa Bekele in the summer of 2001. Earlier that year we had moved out to Addis Ababa, and in our first year I ended up spending a lot of time at the Addis Ababa Stadium in conversation with officials at the Ethiopian Athletics Federation about plans to stage Ethiopia’s first international mass-participation road race which would take place later that year.
It was the week after the 2001 IAAF World Championships in Edmonton where Haile Gebrselassie had relinquished his 10,000m crown to Charles Kamathi, having won four consecutive world titles in the six years from 1993 to 1999. Kenenisa, who had not made Ethiopia’s team for Edmonton, was training on his own at the national stadium under the watchful eye of his coach, Dr Woldemeskel. Even more vividly than the content of the session (6x800m) I remember thinking as I watched him: “This guy looks incredibly relaxed running at speed!”
Four months later in the first edition of the Great Ethiopian Run International 10km, Kenenisa finished third behind Haile and Assefa Mezgebu (who had won gold and bronze respectively in the Sydney Olympic 10,000m). Kenenisa had already set a world junior record over 3000m in the summer of 2001 (with 7:30:67 just days after the workout I had witnessed in Addis) but he was still relatively unknown.
The following March I travelled to Dublin with the Ethiopian team ahead of the 2002 IAAF World Cross Country Championships and watched Kenenisa run away with both the long course (12km) and short course (4km) races, once again making it look so incredibly easy. Those victories were the start of 10 consecutive world cross-country titles in the years from 2002 to 2006 where he won five “double” titles over 4km and 12km.
Kenenisa Bekele (Mark Shearman)
In March 2007 five of us from the Great Ethiopian Run office drove down to Mombasa to watch the first-ever World Cross Country Championships on Kenyan soil. The heat and humidity of the races in Kenya’s coastal city made the trip a memorable experience, not to mention the crowds of spectators who flocked to the race. I can still recall the roar that went up at that point on the course where Kenenisa had stepped off the track in the run-in to the finish, thus ending his 27-race cross-country winning streak.
Seventeen months later at the 2008 Beijing Olympics, Kenenisa…
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