Many of the greatest stars in road racing are coming to New York on March 21 for the NYC Half-Marathon. They’re some of our sport’s finest athletes—Olympic champions and national and world record-holders. But who are they really? Where did they grow up, what do they like to do in their spare time, and what did they do before they became world-class athletes? Some of the answers might surprise you. Take a peek into the lives of some of our leading athletes. Reported and written by veteran athletics journalist David Powell, formerly of the London Times, these profiles offer insight into who these spectacular runners really are.

Hailing Haile as a Man Worth More than His Medals

A personal appreciation by David Powell

[Read Haile's Top 5 Career Moments]

Give me a wish for the 2012 London Olympics and it would be for Haile Gebrselassie to win the men’s marathon. How better to mark an astonishing 20 years as a world-beating runner?

I remember well the first time I came across Gebrselassie: It was at the 1992 World Junior Championships, in Seoul, when a Kenyan opponent, Josephat Machuka, was disqualified for punching him in the back in frustration as the Ethiopian passed him down the home stretch in the 10,000 meters to win his first global gold medal.

Plenty of athletes since have felt similar frustration, such has been Gebrselassie’s ability to finish off races like a trained assassin. In Seoul, he won the 5000 meters the day after the 10,000 meters, both his gold medals accompanied by championship records. We were watching the future, though we hadn’t yet learned to spell his name. The winner, reporters present recorded, was “Haile Gsilase.”

Everybody in athletics knows his name now. But the measure of the man is not so much what he has achieved on the track and road—an accumulation of records and gold medals that make him arguably the greatest distance runner in history—but the way he has lived his life away from his sport.

When the newspaper for which I was Athletics Correspondent for 18 years, The Times in London, ranked Gebrselassie as the No.1 African sportsperson of all time in January, it recognised not only his accomplishments as a runner but how he has built up business interests designed to benefit those less fortunate in his homeland.

Whether it is in connection with his real estate business, his construction company, his hotel interests, or the schools he has built, Gebrselassie has worn a suit with no less determination than he has donned singlet and shorts. You could tell, back in the early 1990s, that there was more to this young man than athletic brilliance as he worked hard on his English so that he could communicate with the media. He had things to say and he wanted people to understand.

He told us back in 2003, when the number of people he employed had grown from 10 to more than 250, that his motive was to provide jobs in Ethiopia. “All the money I have, I spend in this country,” he said. “It is very difficult living with so many poor people.”

He was one of them once, living in rural penury, his bare feet his only transportation. He would run to and from school, six miles each way. One of 10 siblings living in a mud-and-wood hut, his mother deceased, his father disapproving of his desire to become a top runner, he showed an obduracy that, later in life, would serve him well in competition.

Gebrselassie stood up to his father. “He believed I was wasting my time,” Gebrselassie recalled. “For him, sport was fun and nothing else—you could not make a living from it.”

As a 7-year-old, he hid a radio from his father so that he could listen, from among the sheep and cattle on the family farm, as Ethiopia’s Miruts Yifter won the 5000 and 10,000 meters at the 1980 Moscow Olympics. Eventually, Gebrselassie won the argument.

When he won a Mercedes at age 20, before he could drive, for taking the world 10,000-meter title in 1993, his father admitted defeat. The smooth, graceful running style, the cheerful demeanor—Smiley Haile, we called him—won admirers worldwide.

Throughout his career, I have always found him ready to give generously of his time, just as he gives generously of his wealth back home. Gebrselassie the athlete is justly honored; Gebrselassie the man is perhaps even more honorable.

Race Coverage

Pro Athletes

Beyond the Stats

Other