Haile Gebrselassie of Ethiopia bids farewell to the Athens crowd (© Getty Images)
Athens, GreecePicking up from where he left off after his daily muse during nine days of competition at the World Championships in Paris last summer, Jim Dunaway now brings his is own individual eye on what’s been happening at the Games of the XXVIII Olympiad.
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AFTER a week of watching swimming, basketball, volleyball, fencing boxing and cycling, et cetera on television, it’s a real relief to sit in a proper stadium with a 400-metre track and watch some running, jumping and throwing for a change. As somebody said at dinner Thursday night, “Now let the real Olympics begin!”
And we saw a whole bunch of the real thing, even though today was a fairly ‘light’ day with only two finals.
In the women’s 100m, we saw the remarkable 44-year-old Merlene Ottey, who with 11.14 and looked like she might make the final and perhaps even win a medal.
Carolina Klüft, who blew everyone away in Paris a year ago, took charge of the heptathlon in the second event, the High Jump. All the other morning events had finished, but eight or ten thousand people stayed to watch the Carolina and Co. show, and she responded to the cheers of, ‘Ca-rol! Ca-rol! with a 1.91 leap and an impromptu little boogie dance step. It’s really great to see somebody performing at such a high level and having so much fun doing it.
The men’s Triple Jump qualifying was another high point. In fact, it may well have been the greatest triple jump competition ever in terms of depth: Nathan Douglas of Great Britain jumped 16.84 and didn't even qualify. What's just as impressive is that the five longest qualifiers led by, as you’d expect, Christian Olsson of Sweden, with 17.68 needed only one jump each. Just imagine, now, if you jumped 17.20 in the first round of a competition and found yourself in fifth place! I’m already hyperventilating about Sunday’s final.
Kenenisa Bekele’s victory in the men’s 10,000 was expected, but he made sure everyone who saw it will remember it for a long time. Winning by more than 30 metres with a last lap of 53 seconds or so was like putting the cherry on to of the cake.
Bekele’s time of 27:05.10 also broke Haile Gebrselassie’s Olympic record by a couple of seconds, and signaled the end of an era in another way: ‘Geb’ finished fifth, wearing the same generous smile he always showed us when he won, and after he crossed the line, he shared an Ethiopian victory embrace with Kenenisa and Sileshi Sihine, who’d finished second.
It’s the last we’ll see of Gebrselassie in terms of a championship track race. He pretty much owned the 10,000 for nearly a decade. He moves up to the Marathon, but even so he’ll be 35 by the time Beijing rolls around in 2008.
Still, I have a hunch he’ll stay involved with athletics for some time. He’s too valuable for the sport to lose.
Jim Dunaway for the IAAF
