PARIS, July 5 (AFP) - French hopes of Marie-Jose Perec making a dramatic return by winning world championship 400 metres gold may have been virtually dashed but in European champion Mehdi Baala they could have the makings of the next great 1,500m runner.
The 24-year-old lit up the Stade de France here on Friday with an impressive run that saw him defeat Olympic bronze medallist and world silver medallist Bernard Lagat in style and position himself as the main challenger to end Hicham El Guerrouj’s run of three successive world titles.
Baala, who set a new French record in the process, was in no doubt that he would hound El Guerrouj throughout the 1,500m final - provided no mishap intervenes beforehand - just as Kenya’s Noah Ngeny did so effectively in the 2000 Olympic final to take gold.
Of course the world championships will be different as all the best runners will be there,'' he said. However I will be right behind El Guerrouj, harrying him and ensuring he knows he is not going to have everything his own way,’’ said Baala, who indicated he would be a force to be reckoned with when he finished fourth in that 2000 Olympic final.
Baala accepted El Guerrouj was still the marker for the 1,500 runners, having been unbeaten in the event since that fateful night in Sydney while Ngeny has seen his form collapse and is frequently among the also-rans.
Yes, Hicham is the standard to aim at, but having trained for that 5,000m in Ostrava and lost, I do not know whether that has affected his confidence and perhaps even his speed,'' said Strasbourg-born Baala, who is surrounded by athletes in his family having married France's 1,500m champion in 2001 Hanine Sabri, while his brother Samir won the French marathon last year. Certainly the problems of losing your speed was evident in Ethiopian great Haile Gebrselassie's failure to counter the kick of Abraham Chebii in the 5,000m on Friday and the 30-year-old had expressed his fears for the same happening to El Guerrouj. It is always difficult to return to a shorter distance because obviously if you train for a longer distance like I did for the marathon then you notice the loss of speed when you train for the shorter race,’’ said Gebrselassie, who will run the 10,000m at the world championships in late August.
``Hicham will probably have the same problem, though stepping up to 5,000m from 1,500 is less of a jump than me going from 10,000m to the marathon,’’ added the Ethiopian.
Baala will be hoping El Guerrouj has suffered from the transition and that come August, backed by the passionate home crowd in the Stade de France, he will put an end to the marvellous Moroccan’s reign - and also put a huge question mark over whether El Guerrouj will ever land his Holy Grail of an Olympic 1,500m title.