Asociación de acueducto comunitario la Mariana

FINISHES

At the bell lap of the 10,000-meter final at the 2000 Sydney Olympics, a lead pack of

Africans were bunched together at the front of the race. The mighty Ethiopian Hail

Gebrselassie was tucked in behind the Kenyan John Korir while Geb’s teammate kept

Paul Tergat, Geb’s Kenyan rival, boxed in behind them. Knowing he had to move, Tergat

broke his stride and skipped to the outside of the pack, opening up a lead in seconds. Geb

followed, and with 200 meters remaining, the two legendary runners found themselves in

familiar positions: the tall Tergat holding a lead, the diminutive Geb preparing to run him

down.

The Kenyans—Tergat especially—had been trying for years to beat Geb. In 1996,

at the 10,000-meter final in Atlanta, Tergat broke away with five laps to go, trying to best

his rival with a sustained kick. It was a bold move, as good as any other. Geb was the

world record holder, and no one had proven they could beat him with a balanced 25 laps.

No one could match his speed in the last 200 meters, either; he had an answer for any

tactics. At the start of the final lap in Atlanta, Geb blew past Tergat with a finishing speed

that made his rival look plodding. The Ethiopian cruised to his first Olympic Gold.

In 2000, David Coleman and his broadcasting partner Brendan Foster don’t seem

overly interested in Tergat’s revenge plot, as they narrate in uncharacteristically bored

well have left it too late,’ Coleman observes. Tergat holds his lead around the final turn,

into the final 50 meters, when the five-foot-five Geb begins gaining ground on the lanky

six-foot Kenyan. Both runners, sprinting the life out of their bodies with perfection, both

the picture of poise and intensity and control. Geb grimaces but never breaks form,

gaining inch by inch with absurdly long strides until he’s even with his rival, until the

two runners are one and the same, until he forces his body ahead—a push from his core,

the center of him willing the body forward—and slips ahead in the final meters, finishing

27:18.20 to Tergat’s 27:18.29, a closer margin of victory than that year’s 100-meter dash.

Not once does it look like Geb is desperately surging. When he begins his finish, he just

doesn’t slow. It’s one fluid motion, an invisible shift from fast to faster to win-at-all-

costs. Coleman states, matter-of-factly, “Gebrselassie wins it,” at the peak of his kick, as

if his victory had never been in question. Perhaps this is the ultimate compliment for one

of the world’s greatest runners, a man who, in 2000, hadn’t lost a 10K in seven years and

would go on to make history by breaking 2:04 in the marathon: he made the beautiful and

the impossible look mundane.

Geb always finished with grace, but he was a rarity.

Consider Emil Zatopek, the father of interval training. Zatu was at his peak in the

1952 Olympics, where he completed an impossible sweep, taking gold in the 10K, then

5K, then the marathon. His unlikely 5,000-meter win featured a classic finish for the

Czech: he took the lead at the bell lap with confidence, but Chris Chataway, Herbert

Schade and Alain Mimoun all broke away from him on the backstretch. “And you see

gold medal, silver medal, bronze medal; for me, potato,” Zatopek later said of the

He grimaced and whipped his head from side to side, tucked his arms high and crossed

his body with each stride, elbows wide and churning. Zatu growled and bared his teeth

and passed all three men around the bend, powering through the finish with desperate

intensity. One reporter said Zatopek ran like a man with a noose around his neck. Zatu

himself admitted, “I was not talented enough to run and smile at the same time.”

Or consider Steve Profontaine, the brash American who always ran from the

front. Along with Frank Shorter and Bill Rodgers, Pre helped launch the running boom of

the late 60s and early 70s. The Oregon prodigy was undersized but handsome, with

shaggy sunbleached hair that parted down the middle when he ran. The so-called James

Dean of Track was also the biggest critic of the sport’s governing organization, the AAU,

which kept a strict eye on amateur status, keeping the country’s best runners from earning

money for their wins. Pre lived off food stamps in a trailer in a garbage dump, bartending

part-time to pay his bills. He was also among the rarest of athletes: a cocky competitor

who backed up his talk. More importantly, he had an aesthetic: there was no elegance to

Pre’s running style. Think force, not grace. You could see the effort in every step, and

fans loved him more for it.

At the 1972 Munich games—Pre’s only Olympics—the 21-year-old lost patience

in a tactical 5,000-meter race, unleashing a brutally fast final mile to string out the pack

of sit-and-wait kickers. His move shook most of the field except Lasse Viren and

Mohammed Gammoudi, two experienced runners who shadowed him for three-and-a-

half laps before moving past him on the backstretch. Pre made one final effort, but Viren

cruised in for the win with Gammoudi behind him. The American could only watch,

That devastating race was Pre’s first and last on the Olympic scene: three years later, he

was killed in a car crash in Eugene. At the time of his death, he held every American

record from 2,000 meters to the 10K.

When Pre fans relive that race in Munich, it isn’t with regret, but with pride that

he ran the only kind of race he knew, that he couldn’t do it any other way. If there’s

regret, it’s that Pre didn’t go sooner—that he played the kicker’s game for as long as he

did. “I’m going to work so hard that it’s a pure guts race at the end,” he used to say. “And

if it is, I’m the only one who can win it.” Another quote that’s since made its way to T-

shirts, to posters on the bedroom walls of teenage runners from Eugene to Detroit: “The