The 15 contestants in the men’s 5000m final at the 2003 World Athletics Championships set off on the opening lap with the unmistakable strains of the Star Wars theme tune blasting out over the Stade de France sound system.

At the time, as Kenenisa Bekele shot into the lead and Hicham El Guerrouj settled into his slipstream, the Parisian crowd and the watching world were indeed anticipating a stellar battle between the newly crowned 10,000m champion and the fastest ever 1500m man and miler.

What unfolded over the ensuing 13 minutes was a race for the ages in which the great Ethiopian and the magnificent Moroccan found themselves eclipsed by the birth on the global senior stage of a star who has shone to dazzling effect for 20 years now.

Eliud Kipchoge received little attention as he slotted into third place. In the duel between the big guns seeking a World Championships double, Bekele having outkicked his revered compatriot Haile Gebrselassie to win his first 10,000m title seven days previously and El Guerrouj having four days earlier secured his fourth 1500m crown, nobody expected the 18-year-old Kenyan to emerge as a baby-faced assassin.

Admittedly, Kipchoge had won the U20 men’s title at that year’s World Cross Country Championships in Lausanne and broken the world U20 5000m record at the Bislett Games in Olso, clocking 12:52.61.

But, then, Bekele, at 21, was rapidly emerging as Gebrselassie’s successor as the king of distance running.

He had accomplished the senior men’s long and short race double at the 2002 and 2003 World Cross Country Championships. He had taken the prized scalp of Gebrselassie over 10,000m at the FBK Games in Hengelo early in the 2003 outdoor season and subsequently eclipsed the four-time world 10,000m champion and world record holder at the same distance in Paris.

As for El Guerrouj, the world record holder at 1500m (3:26.00) and the mile (3:43.13), marks which still stand today, he was fresh from completing his fourth successive world outdoor 1500m success in Paris.

‘He ran a smart race tactically’

Doubtless wary of the finishing speed of the middle distance man, Bekele attacked from the off, lasting through the first two kilometres in 2:31.94 and 2:35.33, just one second outside world record pace.

“The 10,000m champion is trying to turn this into a real test of endurance,” said Britain’s 1976 Olympic 10,000m bronze medallist Brendan Foster in the BBC TV commentary box. “If it was a test of speed, I think Bekele would still have a chance, but he’s taking out an insurance policy. He wants to make it fast and hard.”

Bekele kept his foot on the gas with 2:38.17 for the third kilometre, but after passing 3000m in 7:45.44 he made way for Kipchoge, who presided over a markedly slower fourth kilometre, 2:43.02. It was the lull before a prolonged storming finish.

With 900 metres to go, El Guerrouj hit the front and started to wind up the pace. It was unknown territory for the 1500m specialist. His senior debut at 5000m had come only two months previously. At the Golden Spike in Ostrava, he had been outsprinted in the home straight by 20-year-old steeplechaser Saif Saeed Shaheen went on to win his specialist event in Paris.

El Guerrouj, who clocked 12:50.24 behind Shaheen’s 12:48.81, said at the time: “I saw today that I am not yet a 5000m runner but I have a good feeling from my first race. I have to work on my rhythm. “

In the heat of World Championship battle in the Stade de France, the four-time 1500m champion threw in a 59.7-second lap on the penultimate circuit but still had four rivals in tow: Kipchoge and Bekele plus Kenyans John Kibowen, the two-time world cross country short course champion and Abraham Chebii, winner of the Grand Prix Final 3000m in Paris the previous year.

Kipchoge leads the 5000m in Paris (© Getty Images)

At the Kenyan trials the previous month Kipchoge had finished third behind Chebii and Kibowen but the pair tailed off as El Guerrouj upped the pace at the bell. “Not since 1924 has anyone done the 1500m and 5000m double,” said an animated Foster, pointing to Paavo Nurmi’s successes across the city in Stade Colombes at the Paris Olympic Games of 1924. “Is it going to happen again today?”

With 200m to go, he had a two-metre lead on Kipchoge, with Bekele half a stride further behind. Around the final bend, Kipchoge moved alongside the Moroccan, shifting into lane two. Bekele threatened to do the same in lane three but couldn’t match the finishing speed of the other two.

Kipchoge’s head nodded from side to side, as if saying ‘no.’ In fact, it was the strain of a supreme effort that edged him to a marginal victory with a sprinter’s dip for the line. With a final lap of 53 seconds, the teenaged outsider had trumped the two favourites.

The result:
1. Eliud Kipchoge (Kenya) 12:52:79 (championship record)
2. Hicham El Guerrouj (Morocco) 12:52.83
3. Kenenisa Bekele (Ethiopia) 12:53.12
4. John Kibowen (Kenya) 12:54.07
5. Abraham Chebii (Kenya) 12:57.74
6. Gebre Gebremariam (Ethiopia) 12:58.08
7. Richard Limo (Kenya) 13:01.13
8. Zersenay Tadese (Eritrea) 13:05.57

“With 300 metres to go, I was thinking of a medal,” Kipchoge reflected. “When there was 70m left, I saw that Hicham was no longer going away. I decided to go, and now I am the world champion. I am very happy.”

Kipchoge’s manager was delighted too, if a little surprised. Jos Hermens, who also guided Bekele, confessed that he expected both of his charges to finish on the podium, though in a different order.

“But we know that Eliud is very good and that he has a good kick,” added the Dutch distance running guru. “He ran a smart race tactically.”

Twelve months later, Kipchoge, Bekele and El Guerrouj met again for a rematch in the 5000m final at the 2004 Athens Olympics. On that occasion, El Guerrouj outkicked Bekele for the gold, with Kipchoge in third. In doing so, the 29-year-old Moroccan finished his major championship career on a double peak, emulating Nurmi’s Olympic double of 1924 after ending his long quest for the 1500m title four days previously.

Taking the sport to new frontiers

As for Kipchoge and Bekele, two decades on from their classic Paris match, they are still running smartly at the highest level.

In September last year, two months before his 38th birthday, Kipchoge broke the marathon world record in Berlin for the second time, clocking 2:01:09. Two weeks earlier, the 40-year-old Bekele finished third at the prestigious Great North Run half-marathon in the north-east of England.

Both men have scaled the peak of distance running greatness over the past 20 years.

Kipchoge never did recapture his Midas touch on the track, taking that Olympic 5000m bronze in Athens in 2004, then silvers at the same distance behind Bernard Lagat of the USA at the 2007 World Championships in Osaka and behind Bekele at the 2008 Olympics in Beijing.

Since turning to the marathon, however, Kipchoge has found his perfect distance. A four-time winner in London and Berlin, he set the first of his two world records in the German capital in 2018, clocking 2:01:39.

He also became the first man to break the two-hour barrier, albeit in non-record conditions, running 1:59:40.2 with the aid of pacemakers and fluid provision in Vienna in 2019.

In claiming marathon gold in Rio in 2016 and in Sapporo in 2021, Kipchoge became the third man to win back-to-back Olympic titles at the distance, following in the footsteps of Ethiopia’s Abebe Bekele (1960 and 1964) and East Germany’s Waldemar Cierpinski (1976 and 1980).

On the track, Bekele has amassed a gold collection worthy of Fort Knox: Olympic 10,000m in Athens in 2004; Olympic 5000m and 10,000m in Beijing in 2008; world outdoor 10,000m in Paris in 2003, Helsinki in 2005, Osaka in 2007 and Berlin in 2009; world outdoor 5000m in 2009; and world indoor 3000m in Moscow in 2006.

He has also stacked up a staggering record of eleven senior individual gold medals at the World Cross Country Championships. Then there have been the stunning world record runs: 12:39.36 at 5000m in Hengelo in 2004; 26:20.31 for 10,000m in Ostrava in 2004, and 26:17.53 at the same distance in Brussels in 2005.

And, as a marathon runner, Bekele stands as the third fastest of all-time, one of three men to have broken 2:02 – behind Kipchoge’s 2:01:09 world record and Kelvin Kiptum’s 2:01:25 from this year’s London race.

Like the other two leading lights of the Star Wars epic in Paris in 2003, he has taken his sport to new frontiers.

Simon Turnbull for World Athletics Heritage

Eliud KIPCHOGE

Eliud KIPCHOGE

Athlete Representative Jos HERMENS

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