Geneti goes hunting in Budapest

Markos Geneti loved to join hunting expeditions as a boy, and the 2001 World Youth champion from Ethiopia is now in the hunt for a medal at the World Indoor Championships in Athletics, Budapest, Hungary (5 – 7 March) having successfully garnered a spot on the 3000m team.

Tough selection

“There’s very, very stiff competition to get selected,” said Geneti. “Some countries don’t have enough runners who have met the entry standard. Here, it’s a question of who will make the team, and who won’t.”

Geneti’s fastest finish in a 3000m race this season, 7:41.06 in Boston, trails those of three other Ethiopian men, but his 8:08.39 clocking over two miles in Birmingham, where he beat double Olympic champion Haile Gebrselassie, resulted in a 3000m time (behind Gebrselassie, who was leading at that point) of 7:37.9, as confirmed by Geneti’s manager, Mark Wetmore.

Season best times serve as the primary factor in the selection of Ethiopian athletes for world track championships, and when officially considered as a 3000m time by the Ethiopian Athletics Federation, that clocking is sufficient to place Geneti in the two-man Ethiopian team for Budapest, as double World Cross Country champion Kenenisa Bekele, who had run 7:30.77, had already decided not to compete in the World Indoors in order to focus on the World Cross.

The world leading Gebrselassie’s subsequent withdrawal from the Indoor Championships due to injury means that even without his 3000m time from his two-mile Birmingham race being considered, Geneti would have made the team on the basis of his Boston clocking, along with Abiyote Abate, who ran 7:38.43 in Karlsruhe behind Gebrselassie’s 7:29.34.

Either way, the World Junior 5000m silver medallist Geneti, 19, who had been prepared to run another 3000m race if necessary to book his passage, is heading for Budapest, seeking his first senior global medal, in the distance that has brought him the most success abroad so far. “He has run very well over that distance and earned two good times this season,” said Ethiopian national track coach Wolde Meskel Kostre.

From Boston to Birmingham

It was over 3000m that Geneti won at the 2001 World Youth Championships in Debrecen, Hungary, and over the same distance that he earned his first victory in the U.S., in Arkansas in 2002, and also won at the Millrose Games in New York in 2003.

In 2004, at the adidas Boston Indoor Games in January, Geneti placed second in 7:41.06 behind Gebrselassie’s 7:35.24, but both men had hoped to run faster.

“I was very well prepared,” said Geneti, whose expectations were based in part on his third place finish at the same meet in 2003. “Last year, I ran a personal best in Boston. I ran 7:46 and 10 days later in Germany, I lowered it, to 7:40.”

He had expected to better that personal record of 7:40.83 again in Boston, and the fast two-mile race at the Norwich Union Grand Prix in Birmingham three weeks later gave him another chance. “The pacemakers went a little too fast in the first 800m, but we were going for the record,” he said. “I wasn’t necessarily thinking about winning, but I knew I would run very well.”

Speaking immediately after the race, Geneti chose not to focus on his beating Gebrselassie in the last lap. “Haile is our teacher, he is the one every athlete looks up to,” he said. “So what I look at is not my beating Haile, but the fact that I ran a great time.”

Hunting for medals

That time has given Geneti added confidence as he embarks on an opportunity that the depth of Ethiopian runners with faster times deprived him of last year leading up to the Paris World Championships where he failed to make the team, despite his having begun the outdoor season by placing third over 5000m in the Ethiopian national track championships. As he has favoured indoor racing over the cross country season many Ethiopian distance runners focus on, it is fitting that this chance should come indoors for Geneti, although the distance that has become his main event is a mere fraction of those he occasionally covered growing up.

The son of farmers in the rural area of Guti, some 10kms from the town of Nekemt in western Ethiopia, Geneti first thought about becoming a runner after following hunting parties as a boy, despite his parents’ disapproval. “I used to love to go hunting,” he said. “The hunts could be up to 20kms away, so I would run all the way back to get home before dark.”

Going to a soccer match one day, Geneti saw runners preparing to compete and figured it was something he should definitely try his hand at, given the speed with which he covered the distances he ran on hunting trips or errands. “I entered the race,” he said. “It was a 1500m race, and I won.”

Markos Geneti’s journey to an international running career had begun. Now, as he returns to slightly familiar territory - Hungary, the site of his World Youth gold medal - having secured the World Indoor Championships berth he pursued this season, the chase for a senior medal begins in earnest.