Brilliant Bekele lays double claim to mantle of greatest

ATHLETICS:THAT THE track and field show of the 29th Olympiad ended with some of us still debating which athlete had given the ultimate performance was a sure sign we'd been spoilt. Then again, perhaps we were just trying to distract ourselves from what happened to Alistair Cragg.

Of all the depressing ways to end your Olympics, a DNF - as in Did Not Finish - next to your name is the most painful and crippling. That it happened on the last day of track in Beijing with the last real Irish hope and to a man who had encountered such emotion in getting there was the ultimate blow.

As Sonia O'Sullivan's father once reminded us after a similar disappointment, no one had died; it's just that it sort of felt that way. It wasn't just a turning point for Irish running; it was a low point.

It's a pity, as it took from an extraordinary athletics climax inside the Bird's Nest. Three further Olympic records, including one truly great one: after running a combined total of 50 laps of the track in just over 50 minutes to the 5,000-10,000-metre double, Kenenisa Bekele has now surely claimed that most treasured of appellations: "greatest of all time".

The small man from Ethiopia, still only 26, has now certainly done enough to surpass his great compatriot Haile Gebrselassie. This, after all, was a double beyond even Gebrselassie, and when Bekele failed four years ago in Athens, taking 10,000-metre gold but only silver at 5,000 metres, it looked beyond him too.

If Bekele had any doubts this time he never showed them. He took off with six laps remaining in Saturday's 5,000-metre final and hit the finish line in an astonishing 12:57.82 - knocking eight seconds off the Olympic record that since 1984 had stood to Morocco's Said Aouita.

"Beat that," he might have said.

Later, Bekele put his achievement down to two things - "hard work, much effort" - and there's no way of overstating how hard Ethiopian distance runners train.

In the run-up to Beijing, Bekele's manager Jos Hermans was told to stay away from his athlete as he was closeted away at the Ethiopian training camp, which is now the most productive distance camp in the world.

Bekele has now emulated another legendary Ethiopian, Miruts Yifter, the last man to pull off the 5,000-10,000m double, in Moscow in 1980.

Of course another Ethiopian, Tirunesh Dibaba, had effectively beaten Bekele to it; on Friday night she become the first woman to do the distance double.

Bekele's old rival Eliud Kipchoge of Kenya followed him home in 13:02.80, Kenya also taking bronze through Edwin Soi, who ran 13:06.22.

Not that it was a bad end to Kenya's Olympics. They'd earlier won the men's 800 metres and women's 1,500 metres, for a total of four gold medals on the track, the same haul as Ethiopia. This merely underlines the situation where Kenya and Ethiopia are the superpowers of distance running.

Just seven months ago Kenya were effectively embroiled in civil war and in Beijing they've been at total peace.

At 28, Wilfred Bungei was the oldest man in the 800-metre final but also the quickest, and so he figured the best way to win was from the front, which is exactly what he did - claiming gold in 1:44.65.

There was fairly symbolic silver medal for Sudan's Ahmed Ismail, won in 1:44.70. Not only was it Sudan's first Olympic medal on the track, but it was achieved in China, and the political undertones to that are obvious.

China, meanwhile, had dejectedly failed to make the impact the desired on the track-and-field programme, their best achievement being the bronze medals won by two of their women.

Amazingly, no Kenyan woman had previously won Olympic gold medals, and now they're going home with two.

Nancy Jebet Langat was considered an outsider in the 1,500 metres, but she hit the front with 250 metres remaining to win convincingly in a lifetime best of 4:00.23.

Before the night was out, Norway's Andreas Thorkildsen had thrown an Olympic record in winning the javelin (90.57 metres).

The American 4x400-metre team did likewise when winning in 2:55.39, and Belgium's Tia Hellebaut caused one of the biggest upsets of the entire nine days when beating Croatia's odds-on high-jump favourite, Blanka Vlasic, on countback, having been the first to clear 2.05 metres.

After all that, we were left to consider Alistair Cragg.

There's never a good reason for dropping out of a race, because it's always going to sound like an excuse. Cragg didn't excuse himself but he did have a reason: a hamstring and hip injury that he'd apparently sustained back at the training camp in Japan had flared up at exactly the wrong time.

"I tried to ignore it," explained Cragg, who had started well, before dropping off, then dropping out, with six of the 12-and-a-half laps remaining.

"It got bad after the 5,000-metre heats. I couldn't get out of bed the next morning, and it got worse and worse since. I wasn't able to run at all the last couple of days. Even when I dropped, I really tried for one last hurrah, but it just wasn't happening. I really could not have finished. Unless I kept walking around. It was seriously bad.

"But this won't dent my commitment to the sport. I think I need to surround myself with some more motivated athletes. And the marathon is always in the back of my mind, but I just don't know if my body can handle that kind of training. I can't just say I'm done with the track though."

Cragg then reiterated his belief that Irish athletics needs to stop its bickering and come together.

"I know I spoke quite emotionally after the heats, but I wasn't trying to point fingers. It's just the fact that a lot of us have come here, have done all we can for a peak performance, and we're stripped to pieces. Running is a lonely sport, and I don't know why people think it's a gift to be able to find someone's weakness, and write about, or comment about it.

"It shouldn't be a matter of finding a weakness in someone like Derval O'Rourke or David Gillick. It should be a matter of finding the strength, to tell youngsters that this is what you can become. I know David, at 15, had no dream of coming to the Olympics, and yet he made it.

"I don't think we're attracting enough youngsters to the sport. They all want to play rugby or soccer. The talent is there, but the pool is shrunk all the time, and that's part of my frustration, because the more we get stripped apart, the less appealing this sport becomes to youngsters, and the more desperate people become for success, the worse the stripping gets. We're just falling into a downhill spiral."

So that's the debate he's helped start. It is as urgent as it is timely.