Calderwood in China: Day 9 - Men’s 5000 meters

by Stuart Calderwood

After Bernard Lagat, the defending double-world champion at 1500 and 5000 meters, shocked everyone by failing to make the 1500-meter final here by two hundredths of a second, he was quoted as saying that he would go all-out to win the 5000 meters. This meant that he would have to take on the world record-holder, Ethiopia’s Kenenisa Bekele, who had already won the 10,000 meters here and would now attempt to become only the sixth man to win both races at an Olympics. Bekele usually seems unbeatable, but he has been comparatively vulnerable in major-championship 5000-meter races, especially when he doubles back after a 10,000. In both the 2003 World Championships in Paris and the 2004 Olympics in Athens, Bekele allowed the pace to lag enough to enable runners without his endurance but with as much raw speed to keep contact until the last homestretch and outsprint him. Hicham El-Guerrouj of Morocco accomplished this in each race; Eliud Kipchoge of Kenya beat them both in Paris.

Lagat is another member of that very exclusive club: people who have outkicked Bekele. He did it two summers ago in the London Grand Prix 5000 meters with a last lap in 51.9, nearly inconceivable speed for the end of a race that long. Even though Lagat hasn’t seemed at full strength recently, I could imagine him staying with a slow pace and producing a finish that no one could match, as he had when he won the World Championships 5000 in Osaka last year.

In his semifinal here, though, Lagat made a mistake that no good poker player would make. Running in third place and behind Bekele, with the qualifiers already decided, he needed only to cross the line, walk away, and prepare for the final. He might have stayed under the radar for Bekele, who had Kipchoge and other Africans to worry about, by preserving the impression that he was off his game; everyone assumed that he must be flat after his kick didn’t materialize in the 1500-meter semifinal. Perhaps Lagat needed a psychological lift after his 1500 debacle; for whatever reason, he turned on his famous miler’s speed and strode smoothly past Bekele and James Kwalia of Qatar to win the semifinal. It was like peeking at his cards and smiling; it might not have looked very important, but I think it was enough to remove his only chance of winning the final. Now Bekele would remember not only Paris and Athens, but London, too. He’d be sure not to let a kicker like Lagat—especially one with so much at stake—stay within striking distance this time.

I was sitting with a large contingent of British track fans before the final, and the conversation centered on a hope that another scenario like the bizarrely slow women’s 5000 didn’t materialize. The British love middle- and long-distance running, and I was surrounded by several men who were intimidatingly knowledgeable about it. To establish some credibility in compensation for being American, I threw in the names of some great British 5000-meter men—Ian Stewart, who’d famously outleaned Steve Prefontaine for the last medal in Munich; Brendan Foster, who’d led into the last lap in Montreal before Lasse Viren headed a mass sprint past him; and Tim Hutchings and Eamonn Martin, both finalists in Los Angeles, who were now expert TV commentators at major meets. (I’d recently seen Hutchings, who’d been the emcee at the first World Marathon Majors awards ceremony last year in the Central Park Boathouse restaurant.) The men around me nodded; they liked listening to Hutchings and Martin, too, they said, and to Steve Cram, the former world-record miler. "Those chaps know their athletics," said one, using the British term for track and field. "Eamonn Martin won the London Marathon, you know, in 1993. Last British man to do it." (I’d sensed a tinge of chagrin amongst the group at the absence of British men from the top level of the sport recently. There would be none in this final, either, Mo Farah having gone out in the qualifying round.)

The Beijing men’s 5000 meters opened with a slow lap, and that was all that the Ethiopians would tolerate; Bekele’s younger brother Tariku immediately took over the front-running. (Ethiopians are famous for team tactics; family tactics may be rare even for them.) Lagat cruised in the lead pack looking the most comfortable of anyone, and my hopes for him stayed high until the last kilometer of the race. We may never know whether it had anything to do with Lagat’s presence, but Kenenisa Bekele had clearly decided that this race would not be a classic Olympic waiting game. With five laps left, he took the lead and ran 400 meters in 60 seconds.

What followed made this race special even among dominating Olympic victories; even among completions of dominating Olympic double victories. After that lap in 60, Bekele ran the next four—the final 1600 meters—in 3:57. Yes, that’s better than four-minute-mile pace for five full laps. Lagat stayed there for the first two, but then he had to surrender. So did the rest of the world’s best runners, one by one, until Bekele was alone with a lap to go.

Would he cruise to the finish, celebrating, or would he sprint hard for a fast time? Both, it turned out. Bekele has never seemed a particularly lighthearted young man, but as the big video screen showed him in close-up entering the final turn, in the middle of a 53.8-second final 400 meters at the end of a 12:57 5000 meters, his face lit up with a big, grateful, amazingly relaxed smile. He crossed the line waving to the crowd.

In completing the distance double, Bekele joined the great Czech Emil Zátopek; Viren and his countryman Hannes Kolehmainen, the first Flying Finn; Russian iron man Vladimir Kuts; and, most significantly, the Ethiopian Miruts Yifter, the last man to accomplish the feat—28 years ago, in Moscow.

There haven’t been any British winners of the Olympic 5000, but the Union Jack-waving group around me was as elated as I was by what we’d just watched. I turned to the guy next to me, about my age, whom I’d admired for limping around on a crutch across the vast expanses of the Olympic venues all week—he’d had a hip replaced—and said, "That’s the Olympic record, right? Wasn’t it still Aouita’s 13:05 from 1984?" "That’s right," he said, and then, after a pause, "I was in that race, actually."

I thought I hadn’t heard him right. "You were at that race?"

"No, I was in the race."

I struggled for an appropriate way to respond, but none was readily available. "All this time I’ve been sitting here…

[sitting there thinking he was just another guy who loves watching races, who probably used to run them himself, and who knows how exhilarating it can be to see an Olympic record set, let alone one like we’d just seen. And he was all those things.]

…I’d probably know your name…"

"Eamonn Martin," he said, and shook my hand. "Cheers."

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