Remembering the late-blooming Adere's remarkable indoor debut

Berhane Adere got her first ever glimpse of an indoor track when she arrived at the Hanns-Martin-Schleyer-Halle in Stuttgart on the afternoon of 3 February 2002. The 28-year-old Ethiopian received an invitation to make her debut on the boards in the 3000m at the Sparkassen Cup meeting just five days previously. She arrived the night before, thoughts of a barrier-breaking performance far from her mind.

Adere’s prime concern was how to negotiate 15 laps of the tightly-banked 200m track as part of a 16-strong field. Her manager, Volker Wagner, told her to make straight for the spot behind the pacemakers, leaving the potential danger of the pack behind. It was only when the leaders passed 1km in 2:50 that her thoughts turned towards the 8:32.88 that Gabriela Szabo had clocked in Birmingham twelve months previously.

Wagner shouted from the infield that the Romanian’s world indoor record was a possibility. The prospect came as a surprise to the meet organisers. The television broadcast had ended a minute before the start of the race, some 10 minutes after Svetlana Feofanova broke Stacy Dragila’s world indoor pole vault record with a 4.71m clearance.

After the pacemakers reached 2km in 5:41.80, Adere took over for the ultimate kilometre. The tall, smooth-striding Ethiopian got into a metronomic groove, clicking off the final five laps at between 33 and 34 seconds. The capacity 7000 crowd rose to its feet as she crossed the line in 8:29.15 – 3.33 seconds inside Szabo’s global mark.

“I have never trained for indoor running,” Adere said. “My main focus this winter was to do some cross country and road races, but I really liked running indoors today. The banked track felt very good.”

Historic record moments

As the meet organisers hastily prepared to hand over a second €25,000 world record bonus, the self-effacing Adere was unaware of the significance of her performance.

It was the first sub-8:30 3000m run by a woman indoors. The first outdoors, 8:27.2, was achieved by Lyudmila Bragina of the Soviet Union, the 1972 Olympic 1500m champion, at College Park in the USA in 1976.

It was also the first world indoor record in a distance event by an Ethiopian woman. In that respect, it opened the floodgates. There have been 10 more since then and Ethiopian woman now hold every indoor world record in distance events from 1000m to 5000m.

At the time, for Adere herself, it maintained the momentum of a belated breakthrough into the realms of the global elite.

“God did not permit”

For five years, she had been knocking on the door. She was 23 when she made the Ethiopian team for the Olympic Games in Atlanta in 1996, finishing 18th in the 10,000m final.

The following year she made her World Athletics Championships debut in Athens, faring better than her celebrated compatriots in the 10,000m.

While Deratu Tulu, the 1992 Olympic 10,000m champion, failed to qualify from the heats and the 1996 world cross country champion Gete Wami pulled up in the final with a pulled muscle, Adere placed fourth – behind Kenya’s Sally Barsosio, Fernanda Ribeiro of Portugal and Japan’s Masako Chiba. She was, however, seven seconds shy of the bronze medal position.

In the heat of Seville in 1999 she finished 0.48 shy of the podium - in seventh place in a thriller of a 10,000m final in which Wami outsprinted Britain’s Paula Radcliffe to become the first Ethiopian woman to win a world track title.

After dipping to 12th place in the 2000 Olympic 10,000m final, Adere’s career might have looked to be fading but in 2001 she started to finally achieve her rich potential.

Just 0.04 separated her from 10,000m gold at the World Athletics Championships in Edmonton after a titanic tussle with Tulu, by then a two-time Olympic 10,000m champion, over the final lap. Still, taking silver ahead of Wami in an Ethiopian medal sweep represented a tangible step up for Adere, who swiftly followed up with a bronze medal run behind Radcliffe and Kenya’s Susan Chepkemei in the World Athletics Half Marathon Championships in Bristol, England.

Then came her world record-breaking indoor debut in Stuttgart in February 2002. That, in turn, was followed by victories that year in the 3000m at the World Athletics Continental Cup in Madrid and at the World Half Marathon Championships in Brussels, where she won by seven seconds from Chepkemei in 69:06.

As 2003 dawned, and her 30th birthday approached, Adere had established herself as one of the leading lights of global distance running.

“Before Edmonton, it was really frustrating for me,” she said at the time, reflecting on her emergence. “Whenever a major international event came around, everyone thought that this was my opportunity, this was my time. But God did not permit.”

Honing her kick with Haile

Even the breakthrough in Edmonton had a bittersweet taste. “My inexperience showed on the last lap,” Adere said. “I knew then that I had to work hard on my finishing kick. That’s what I have been doing in training.”

Adere trained under the direction of Ethiopia’s national team coach Dr Wolde Kostre in a group that included Haile Gebrselassie, the two-time Olympic and four-time world 10,000m champion.

Like Gebrselassie and Tulu, she happens to be a member of the Oromo tribe. While the other greats of Ethiopian distance running came from poor rural families, Adere was raised in relative comfort on her parents’ large farm in the Shewa District, 100km from Addis Ababa.

Having honed her finishing kick in the company of Gebrselassie, she proceeded to make 2003 her annus mirabilis. Already a world champion on the road, she proved a class apart in the 3000m final at the World Athletics Indoor Championships in Birmingham in the March, finishing 1.92 ahead of Spain’s Marta Dominguez, with her teenage teammate Meseret Defar in third. They were Ethiopia’s first world indoor medals in a women’s event.

In June that year, Adere came tantalisingly close to the world 5000m record, 14:28.09 by Bo Jiang of China, clocking 14:29.32 at the Bislett Games in Oslo.

Two months later, in August 2003, she became a world outdoor champion at the age of 30. She did so in supreme style in the 10,000m final at Stade de France in Paris - unleashing a devastating kick from 250m out on the back of a punishing pace that took her to victory in 30:04.18, a championship best, African record and third-fastest on the world 10,000m all-time list. Tulu having dropped out shortly after halfway, Worknesh Kidane took silver for Ethiopia in 30:7.15.

Adere was to gain three further global medals, all of them silver: behind Radcliffe at the 2003 World Half Marathon Championships in Vilamoura, as runner-up to Defar in the 3000m at the 2004 World Indoor Championships in Budapest, and in the wake of fellow countrywoman Tirunesh Dibaba in defence of her world 10,000m crown in Helsinki in 2005.

Solo Stuttgart run smashes Szabo’s record

She also claimed a second world indoor record – back on the Schleyer-Halle track in Stuttgart in January 2004. Having missed Szabo’s 5000m record of 14:47.35 by less than a second in Dortmund the previous year, she launched an all-out solo attack from 3km out and reduced it to smithereens, clocking 14:39.29. “I thought it was better to push hard from a long way out than to come up short again,” she said.

Even after her late-blooming track career came to an end, there was more to come from Adere. At 33, she turned to the marathon in 2006, winning in Chicago in 2:20:42. She won again in the Windy City in 2007 and also competed in the Olympic marathon in Beijing in 2008, failing to finish.

Simon Turnbull for World Athletics Heritage