Wilfred Bungei celebrates his Olympic 800m victory (© Getty Images)
MonteCarloIn the penultimate episode of their review of the 2008 Athletics year, statisticians A. Lennart Julin and Mirko Jalava reach the topic of the MIDDLE DISTANCE running events.
MEN
800m
Abubaker Kaki was the name of the season in the 800m distance. It wasn’t a big surprise really as Kaki had run 1:45.78 already as a youth athlete in 2006 and 1:43.90 in 2007, but he seemed to be hard as a rock at the start of 2008.
Kaki won both of his two races prior to the World Indoor Championships setting a national indoor record of 1:46.06 in Leipzig. The Sudanese won the gold in Valencia with another national record of 1:44.81.
He then set the World junior record of 1:42.69 in his first outdoor meet of the season in Oslo winning the race too. Kaki then continued his season with only three more races before Beijing winning them all, including the World Junior Championships final. But in the end the perfect season was not to be – Kaki never made it to the Olympic final in Beijing fading in the final 200m of the semifinal.
Instead it was 28-year-old Kenyan Wilfred Bungei who took the Olympic title at a surprising moment of his long distinguished career. Bungei, who has been among the world’s best 800m runners for years wasn’t exactly close to the top this season. But Bungei, winning his first international race of the season in the final of the Olympic Games finally hit his best form needed at the right time.
The Kenyan ace had won the silver medal in Edmonton World Championships 2001, but had not got another outdoor medal since. Bungei, who finished the season being only the 15th fastest 800m runner in the world in 2008, won the World Indoor Championships in Moscow 2006.
USA has 19 athletes in the world top 100 with Kenya second at 16. Spain has eight for third place.
1500m
In the men’s 1500m, victories were spread all over the place during the 2008 season. Gone are the days when one athlete like Hicham El Guerrouj or even Saïd Aouita (both MAR) commanded the event.
Kenyans Daniel Kipchirchir Komen, Augustine Choge and Asbel Kiprop all recorded one big win with a fast time prior to Beijing, but weren’t able produce consecutive victories. USA’s 2007 double World champion (1500/5000m) Bernard Lagat (USA) was considered a favourite, but his season before the Olympics did not promise that much.
Although 28-year-old Rashid Ramzi got the silver medal from Osaka and had won both 800m and 1500m titles in the Helsinki World Championships in 2005, his first outdoor 1500m of the season, the Olympic heat, was still a shock. The Bahrain-athlete soared to a 3:32.89 finish, the fastest time in a heat, all-time. Following that performance it was a given that Ramzi would be a player in the final as well. For a moment it looked like his final sprint would not be enough, but he made it in the end winning the Olympic gold narrowly in 3:32.94 ahead of Asbel Kiprop’s 3:33.11 for the second place.
Nick Willis continued Kiwi-traditions in this event giving New Zealand another major championships medal in the 1500m, a bronze. This medal was the first in 1500m for New Zealand since John Walker won in 1976.
Kenya has 23 athletes in the world top 100 with USA second at 12. France and Spain both have six for third place.
WOMEN
800m
It shouldn't have been possible in this day and age, that a teenage athlete who tries a new event ends up not only Olympic champion but also owner of the greatest ever seasonal record in the event! But that is exactly what Kenya’s Pamela Jelimo achieved in the women's 800m in 2008!
The occasional surprise by an "unknown" athlete in a major championship happens but as said: Even though she didn't get the 25-year-old World record Jelimo in her debut year as an 800m-runner compiled not just a perfect string of first places but also the greatest ever set of top times in the history of the event.
Her six times between 1:54 and 1:55.5 surpasses the complete career achievements of all other female 800m runners! Three athletes (Kratochvilova, Mineyeva and Mutola) have three sub-1:55.5 each, two others (Olizarenko and Quirot) have two each, and seven more have dipped under that mark once each. But Jelimo as said did it six times in her first season.
So it would not come as much of a surprise when it turns out that her average winning margin in her twelve finals was a hefty 3.02 seconds. And that gigantic gap to the opposition certainly was not due to her avoiding tough competitions. Jelimo's 12 meets were made up of one global (Olympics) and one continental (African) championship, six Golden League, the World Athletics Final, a Grand Prix (Hengelo) plus the national trials for the two international championships.
One athlete that Jelimo faced no less than nine times was the reigning World champion Janeth Jepkosgei who herself had taken over the event in very impressive fashion last summer. Jepkosgei certainly did not slump this year, her best time was just 0.03 off her PB from 2007, her countrywomen Jelimo simply was so much better. The best ever!
In the shadow of Jelimo's heroics just about everything that happened in the 800m this year went by unnoticed. However, the tough pace Jelimo initiated in all her races seemed to have a slightly positive influence on the overall levels statistically.
Outside the international circuit, the Russian national events as usual provided a major portion of the top marks. But also as usual the Russian runners selected for the major championships (this year the Olympics) were not able to live up the expectations there seasonal best marks had created. There were no medals and Tatyana Andrianova, on paper the silver medallist, ended up last in the Olympic final!
If 2008 will go down in history as the year Pamela Jelimo emerged it should also be remembered as the year when the perhaps the greatest of them all – Mozambique’s Maria Mutola – bowed out with honour after two decades as a mainstay on the international scene. Not capable of matching the youthful Jelimo – who was born the year after Mutola's Olympic debut – Mutola still put together a respectable final year running her best time (1:57.68) when getting 5th in the Olympic final.
The obvious question now: Will the Mutola era in the 800m be replaced by a similar Jelimo era? Mutola is a really tough act to follow, at least as longevity at the top is concerned: At age 19 in 1991 Mutola set a World Junior record of 1:57.63 - and then she ran sub-1:59 for another seventeen straight years (thirteen of those sub-1:57)!
1500m
This was probably the most confusing year in the 1500m annals. It all began brilliantly indoors where the World Indoor Championships brought one of the greatest races of all-time (outdoors included) with the top-4 runners dipping under the 4:00-barrier.
But when the Olympics came along five months later only two of the top-7 in Valencia were eligble to compete, the other five being reportedly suspended or under investigation for violating doping regulations.
The two runners from the World Indoors final still remaining in the mix were Ethiopia’s Gelete Burka and Bahrain’s Maryam Jamal and most observers probably expected these two battling it out for the gold medal in Beijing. However, Burka missed advancing to the final after letting the pace become much too slow. And Jamal surprisingly "ran out of gas" in the all-decisive last half lap of the final.
So the final podium became Kenyan Nancy Lagat, and two Ukrainians Irina Lishchynska and Natalya Tobias which just about nobody could or would have been able to guess in advance. Especially the winner was really a long shot as Lagat’s last two meets leading up to Beijing was a 3rd place in the Kenyan trials and a 10th place in Athens Grand Prix.
But the times in the Olympic final were still quite reasonable with 4:00 for Lagat and 4:01 for the two Ukrainians, so it definitely couldn't be called a weak competition despite the absence of almost all the expected main contenders.
With all the supposed doping cases not yet finally resolved it is more or less impossible to make a comprehensive assessment of the "state of the union" in 2008 as well as of the prospects for 2009. It could, however, be noted that Shannon Rowbury (age 24, USA) and Lisa Dobriskey (age 25, GBR) were two in 2008 vastly improved runners that came very close to breaking the 4:00-barrier and that also were very close to the medals in Beijing.
IAAF