One of the last people I saw before I left Singapore, and the Youth Olympic Games last week, was Wilson Kipketer. A lot more relaxed than the intense figure who trod the tracks of the world so elegantly (and speedily) a decade and more ago, the Kenyan-born Dane walked over, face wreathed in smiles, despite knowing the first thing I was going to say to him.
David Rudisha had broken his world 800 metres record a couple of days earlier, so before I could open my mouth, he got his retaliation in first. “Look, it was inevitable, wasn’t it? It wasn’t going to last forever. It was a great run,” he said of Rudisha’s 1.41.09. “But,” placing a firm hand on my shoulder he added conspiratorially, “when I get home, I’m going to study the video frame by frame”.
By the time Kipketer got home, the task was rendered futile, because Rudisha had gone on to run 1.41.01, acting on an evaluation after his first WR that he could get into the 1.40s. He just ran out of track in Rieti, Italy last Sunday. And he may have run out of time this season. But, in contrast to Kipketer, who was in his mid-20s when he was burning up the track, the statuesque Rudisha isn’t 22 until December. And if he can keep his giant frame injury free, that mind-blowing sub-1.40 may even be within his compass.
The pair are linked by more than being 800 metres world record holders from Kenya. For Kipketer and Rudisha have both been guided by Colm O’Connell, the former before he left to study engineering in Denmark in the early 1990s, and the latter, since Colm watched the teenage tyro decathlete(would you believe?) run a 400 metres for another school, and invited him to come and train with his group. The rest, as they say, is history.
Now, coaches range from unsung heroes to dominating loudmouths. Despite having already coached two Olympic champions - Peter Rono and Matthew Birir - and many other world-class athletes, including Kipketer by the time I first met him in the early 1990s, the quietly spoken, unassuming Brother Colm O’Connell was the epitome of the man who had laboured, as he had done, virtually unknown and unrecognised in the comparative wilderness of Iten in Kenya’s Western Highlands for close to 20 years.
It is probably safe to say that nowadays, the Patrician brother from Cork in southern Ireland, is the most successful, if not yet the most famous coach in the world. The latter acclaim tends to belong to the loudmouths in the more commercial sports.
Colm cheerfully admits that when he went to teach at the now celebrated St Patrick’s School in Iten in 1976, he knew next to nothing about track and field athletics. At that time, the closest St Pat’s had to a world record holder was Brit, Brendan Foster’s younger brother, Peter, who was teaching and coaching there as part of a Voluntary Service Overseas (VSO) programme.
Foster cajoled Colm into helping out at the track, holding the stopwatch, etc, “and when he left at the end of the year, he handed over the watch and cap and stuff, and said, here, it’s all yours”.
After a crash course of coaching manuals, Colm came to a conclusion that has helped him ever since. “I listen to the athletes, I ask them how they feel, what they want to do, what they feel comfortable with. And we progress from there. I don’t coach them, they coach me”.
That philosophy has proved a bedrock for a production line of champions, including two more Olypic gold medallists, in Reuben Kosgei and Brimin Kipruto, along with world champions like Wilson Boit Kipketer (no relation) and Janeth Jepkosgei, and scores of other world class athletes.
But another measure of the man, and his lack of presumption is the ease with which he talks of his comparative failures. “Paul Ereng,” he says ruefully, “he couldn’t even make our 4×400 metres team at St Pat’s. I told him he probably wasn’t going to make it”. Ereng, as you may recall, went to college in the US, switched from 400 to 800 metres in 1987, and won the Olympic two-lap title one year later, in Seoul.
But the man of the moment is Rudisha, son of 1968 Olympic 4×400 relay silver medallist, Daniel Rudisha. He may owe his genes to dad, and mom, of course. But he knows who else was in the mix. “He (Colm) has been possibly the most important person in my career,” said Rudisha after Rieti.
When Alberto Juantorena won the unlikely 400/800 metres double at the Montreal Olympic Games in 1976 (the year that Colm arrived in Iten), setting a world record 1.43.5 in the latter race, and breaking it with 1.43.4 the next year, the two-lapper was considered to be the domain of the giants, since El Caballo was approaching two metres tall, ie well over six feet.
The diminutive Sebastian Coe threw all that out of kilter with his two WR’s, ending on 1.41.73; and though Kipketer was taller than Coe, he was just as slight. But with Rudisha coming in at something like Juanto’s stature, the 800 metres has been returned to the Land of the Giants.
He may be considerably smaller and shorter, but there’s another giant in there too. His name is Colm O’Connell.
* I’m sure you will excuse my indulgence if I tell you that Colm is one of the stars of my TV documentary Race For Kenya, which can be found elsewhere on www.globerunner.org
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