Cape Elizabeth, ME – I was speaking with four-time Olympian Meb Keflezighi at the TD Beach to Beacon High School Miles last night at Fort Williams Park after we all watched the Olympic 10,000 m final in Paris. And it was Meb’s belief, which I shared, that Ethiopia’s Yomif Kjelcha (the most aggressive of the Ethiopians when he did take the lead) should’ve tried to break away fully from that tail of runners that the three Ethiopians had strung out from the onset.  

Fellow Ethiopians Berihu Aregawi and Selemon Barega, the defending Olympic champion, and Kjelcha traded off the lead and maintained a very hard pace from lap three onward, hitting 13:23 through halfway. Though they insured an Olympic record time, they didn’t actually burn off enough of the guys who were just sitting behind them taking the very rough ride. 

You never saw Ugandan world record holder Joshua Cheptegei throughout the race until about two laps to go when he finally presented himself on Khelcha’s shoulder saying, in essence, “here I am. Now what are you gonna do?”

And with 500 to go, he bolted away and won the final lap sprint and the Olympic gold medal to redeem his silver from Tokyo 2021. 

But with seven guys within 1.02 seconds at the line, including the marvelous American bronze medalist Grant Fisher, the Ethiopians’ pace wasn’t hard enough to break the people that eventually went by on the final lap. Aregawi had to come on with desperate late rush to nip Grant Fisher for the silver by .02. 

Two famous races are worth mentioning here. First, the 1974 Commonwealth Games 1500m when Filbert Bayi of Tanzania broke Jim Ryun’s world record by blasting out from the gun like a scalded cat and running headlong into history. John Walker, Rod Dixon and the other top guys in the Empire were caught off guard and never caught up as the Tanzanian broke Ryun’s record by 1/10 of a second.

No one had ever attacked a 1500m like that before, turning the tables on waiting until the final lap sprint. By breaking from the gun, Bayi established a gap he never relinquished. Truly ballsy racing. 

Then there was the 1988 Seoul Olympic 5000m final when John Ngugi of Kenya exploded from the back of the pack like a bottle rocket after the opening 2:42 kilometer. He tossed off a 2:00-2:02 800m, essentially using his kick in the second fifth of the race. He, too, got away to a 40-50m lead and the chasers never reeled him back in. 

One of the Ethiopians in Paris had to do something in yesterday’s 10,000m to reduce the contender field of 13 down to 3, 4,or 5. Don’t let it come down to seven guys still in the hunt with one lap to go after you’ve done all the work, which is what happened. 

I guess it’s easy to be an armchair quarterback from this vantage point. But you gotta do something extraordinary to try to get away from people who can run this fast these days wearing these super shoes. 

The fact that 13 guys broke 27 minutes when no one had never done it before in Olympic history is evidence of that. 

Grant Fisher admitted doing double workouts and double tempo runs in Park City, another one of the advantages of the new super shoes, allowing athletes to train like they never have before, to get fitter than ever before. So what might’ve seemed like historic splits were really just today’s version of hard pacing given the new circumstances.

Anyway you wanna look at it, though, it sure was a spectacular race to watch.

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