PLEASE KEEP IN MIND THIS WAS WRITTEN BEFORE THE SYDNEY OLYMPICS. I WILL TRY TO FIND PIX
By Kitkat
Kilometre after kilometre deep into nomadic Masai territory along the deeply rutted mud sludge he called a road, Paul Tergat maintained a light-footed cadence.
At last, after more than an hour running in what was little better than quicksand along the floor of the Great Rift Valley, he finally stopped in frustration.
Not because he was tired. If he was, it didn’t show.
He quit because his $100,000 all-terrain vehicle equipped with GPS satellite navigation could no longer keep up.
The top-of-the-range Toyota Land Cruiser I had driven nervously in pursuit - dove-tailing to avoid boulders, surging across fast-flowing streams and tilting at 45 degrees trying to grip embarkments - had at last become bogged.
So Tergat turned back to the rescue. He had demonstrated once again why he is regarded as the greatest cross-country runner the world has ever seen.
No other man has won the annual IAAF 12km World Cross-Country Championship five years in a row as Tergat did from 1995 to 1999.
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Among distance runners the world cross-country race is considered the hardest event to win because it brings the best road runners up against the best track runners on neutral ground, so to speak.
In March this year Tergat managed to finish a close third, just two seconds behind Belgium’s victorious Mohammed Mourhit.
Under the circumstances it was actually an extraordinary result for Tergat.
He had barely slept before the race after arguing all night with the perennially bungling Kenyan Amateur Athletics Association about their 11th hour deletion of his training partner Joshua Chelanga (fourth in last year’s race).
“I have not had any sleep over the last one or two days. It was light when I finally went to bed on the morning of the race,” Tergat confirmed, before calling for the KAAA administrators to be dismissed by the Kenyan Government.
“Usually we have little problems which we can sort out back home but we have never brought them to a major championship like this.”
Having nevertheless led Kenya to its 15th! consecutive teams title, comfortably outscoring northern neighbour and bitter rival Ethiopia, Tergat stayed on in Portugal for the Lisbon Half-Marathon (a road race over 21.1km).
As if to prove he had been ready a week earlier to win an unprecedented sixth world cross-country title, a rested Tergat took 11sec off his own half-marathon world record in Lisbon clocking 59min 06sec.
He also took an entire minute off Arturio Barrios’ 20km world track best on record in transit to collecting the half-marathon record bonus of $100,000.
It was a phenomenal display of staying power, previewed on the muddy road from Ngong, 45km outside Nairobi and 2,500m above sea level, where photographer Anthony Weate and I caught up with Tergat on his journey toward the Sydney Olympic Games.
He is a feared and respected rival for the Olympic 10,000m title-holder and Sydney favourite Haile Gebrselassie, the little Ethiopian who may confirm himself as history’s greatest track long distance runner if he can win the 5000m-10,000m double in September.
If anyone can stop Gebrselassie it could be Tergat, the 10,000m silver medallist at the last Olympics and at the last two world championships in 1997 and 1999.
His Kenyan 10,000m record of 26min 27.85sec was the world record in 1997 before Gebrselassie reclaimed it in 1998 with a run of 26:22.75.
“I respect Haile quite a lot, really, because the training I am doing is very hard so I can imagine how hard he is training too,” said Tergat, pledging to be in Sydney.
"So I respect him a lot because I know he is not an athlete who likes to sit down and wait for a good result. No. He’s very strong.
"But he’s no Superman. He’s a human being and anything is possible. Anyway, I don’t believe anything is impossible. I believe it is possible to beat him.
"In life you find everybody has his time. Sometimes it doesn’t matter how hard you train, you can find sometimes that day is not your day. No matter how hard you try you will not get something that day.
“I don’t believe in bad luck. I believe in keeping working, but the timing has to come in also.”
A sleek and elegant Kalenjin man born 30 years ago in a mud hut to one of his polygamous father’s three wives, Tergat comes originally from the tiny village of Riwo in the Baringo district perched on a sheer precipice overhanging the Rift.
Iten, the current centre of critical mass for Kenya’s world beating distance runners, is a hazy view 50km away on the escarpment directly across the valley.
Tergat’s father loved athletics and attended every local championship but he never realised he had a talent in his own family until Paul was conscripted into the Kenya airforce in 1990 at the age of 19.
Many Kenyans ran many kilometres to school, but this was not the case with me. Where we live was not more than 800m from the school," he recalled.
"The other problem where I lived was I didn’t have any kind of motivation. There were no local athletes. I didn’t have anybody to idolise.
“I never had an interest in athletics until I trained for the military. It was then I came to realise life was not easy. I met guys like John Ngugi, Richard Chelimo, Moses Kiptanui, Moses Tanui, William Tanui (all world champions) in the military so training with them was a big lesson for me.”
Tergat today is a sergeant in the air force, but athletics has made him a millionaire. He is also now a successful businessman with an office in Nairobi from where he has supervised the construction of “quite a number” of buildings, both commercial and residential.
To ensure that young Kenyans, so often isolated as he was, can be in touch with the deeds of contemporary champions Tergat also publishes, in partnership with Moses Tanui, an informative and entertaining 40-page colour magazine called “The Athlete.”
Tanui, incidentally, has his own reasons for hoping Tergat succeeds in Sydney. Moses did not successfully defend his 1991 world 10,000m title, finishing with silver in the 1993 Stuttgart final after losing a shoe when accidentally clipped at the bell by Gebrselassie.
It was the first of Gebrselassie’s four world titles and he has remained undefeated over the 25-lap distance in the seven years since.
Tanui was so upset the KAAA would not officially back his protest over the Gebrselassie incident he has subsequently refused to represent Kenya.
He turned to the marathon, winning Boston in 1996 and 1998 and was second, in a Kenyan record 2hrs 06min 16sec, to Khalid Kannouchi in the miscreant Moroccan’s world record 2:05:42 victory in Chicago late last year.
Tanui has recently indicated he may recant and run the road race in Sydney - if the KAAA picks him.
Both Tergat and Tanui have been coached since around 1993 by Dr Gabriele Rosa, an eminent Italian exercise physiologist who says he has been devising a test for detecting EPO, the endurance drug of choice.
“I may finish my track and field career in Sydney but it is still my plan to try the marathon,” Tergat said, although he ruled out a road run to Homebush.
"By the way, I think running the marathon is not as tough as the track. You must have very hard workouts for the track.
“It’s very tough and very monotonous also. At least for the marathon you can change courses.”
While Tergat was undecided about whether to chase Kenyan Olympic team selection also in the 5000m, he showed in the 1999 Rome Golden League race he could actually be a Sydney title contender.
The 1997 world champion, former world record-holder and fellow Kenyan, Daniel Komen, won in Rome (in 12min 55.16sec). Tergat ran a near second in 12:55.37.
But Tergat defeated all three men who would place at the Seville world championships which followed a month later, including Morocco’s gold medallist Salah Hissou (by 0.02sec!), Kenya’s silver medallist Benjamin Limo and the bronze medallist Mohammed Mourhit.
Generously cleared by the Moroccans last year to represent Belgium when they could find no place for him in their own team, Mourhit won this year’s world cross-country title, so he too is now an obvious medal contender in Sydney.
Tergat had previously placed fourth in the 1999 Kenyan 5000m selection trial and ran only the 10,000m in Seville, his 55.0sec last lap no match for Gebrselassie’s lethal 54.37sec sprint.
Such superlative racing is the consequence of constant and sometimes brutal training.
Tergat nominated his toughest track session as 10 times 1000m in 2min 36sec to 2min 33sec, usually with 2min to 3min recovery between repetitions.
"But when you are starting this you must make sure you are ready, otherwise you will destroy yourself.
“And you must do this when you have enough time to recover, with a month to go because you must have at least two weeks to recover.”
To that end Tergat continued to build his incredible strength for Sydney by running along the muddy roads of the Rift Valley, happily since unencumbered by his Australian passengers.
AND HERE’S WHAT HAPPENED IN THE SYDNEY OLYMPIC 10,000M - WIDELY CONSIDERED THE GREATEST 10,000M RACE IN HISTORY EVEN DESPITE NO WORLD RECORD TIME.
