Gebrselassie is classically trained as a runner. He competed in cross-country and won two Olympic gold medals on the track at 10,000 meters before turning his full attention to the 26.2 miles of the marathon. He is the only man to have run under 2 hours 4 minutes, setting his world mark of 2:03:59 at the 2008 Berlin Marathon.
Now 37, Gebrselassie was also groomed in a relatively closed system of Soviet-influenced coaching and training techniques in the East African nation, which was run by a Marxist military junta from the mid-1970s until the early-1990s.
Ethiopia has long produced great marathoners: Abebe Bikila won the Olympic marathon in 1960 and 1964, becoming the first black African to win a gold medal. His countryman Mamo Wolde won the 1968 Olympic marathon. Fatuma Roba won the women’s Olympic marathon in 1996 and three Boston Marathons. Derartu Tulu, a two-time Olympic champion at 10,000 meters, is the defending women’s champion in New York. Many consider Gebrselassie the greatest distance runner ever.
The difference now is that individual greatness is being enhanced by billowing numbers. In recent years, a flood of Ethiopian runners has challenged the international marathoning supremacy of neighboring Kenya. While Sammy Wanjiru of Kenya, the reigning Olympic champion, won the Chicago Marathon on Sunday, Tsegaye Kebede and Feyisa Lilesa of Ethiopia finished second and third.
Kebede won the London Marathon earlier this year and is the reigning Olympic bronze medalist. Lilesa, only 20, won marathons in Dublin and Xiamen, China, in the last year. Both countrymen have succeeded in ways that Gebrselassie (and Tulu) would find unfamiliar, having effectively skipped or quickly discarded their track careers and gone straight to the marathon.
Kebede, for instance, was making less than a dollar a day gathering firewood and herding animals when he joined a distance training group five years ago at age 18. He made about $200,000 combined for victories in the 2008 Paris and 2010 London marathons.
Last year, Lilesa was cautioned by his coach and agent to first consider a career at shorter distances, but at 19, he told them: “I am ready physically and mentally. I’ve thought about it and I want to move on.”
While Kenya may have three times as many runners as Ethiopia, some agents say that the Ethiopian system of developing athletes is perhaps better organized. While many runners in Kenya are sponsored by the army and police, Ethiopia also has professional clubs, which pay salaries to runners, that are sponsored by banks, hospitals and private individuals, said Hussein Makke, a Lebanese agent who represents Lilesa and has also worked with Kenyans.
The Ethiopian system is also extremely centralized, with the vast majority of runners moving from their home villages to the capital of Addis Ababa to further their careers. Recently, most Ethiopian stars like Gebrselassie, Tulu and Roba have come from the country’s southern highlands. Now top runners are popping up like mushrooms in other regions. Both Kebede and Lilesa, for instance, grew up near the capital.
“We used to think when we get to 30 and are too old for the track, now we do the marathon,” Makke said. “Today, key athletes have had tremendous results and this has impacted on young kids that ‘We can do it, too.’ And more coaches are becoming convinced that they can coach the marathon.”
Steve Jones, a former world-record holder in the marathon from Wales, said in Chicago that the marathon had supplanted the mile as the “blue-ribbon event” of track and field. He called it a “shortcut to fame and glory; you just need one good race and you can set yourself up for half a lifetime with invitations to races.”
Yet Jones urged caution about this leapfrogging to the marathon, calling it “short-sighted” and saying, “I think a lot of athletes miss out on the joy of running on the track and the roads.”
It seems too early to tell with any certainty whether this trend of skipping the track for the marathon will ultimately prove mostly beneficial, neutral or injurious to many careers.
Wanjiru won the Olympic marathon at 21 and now, at 23, is the youngest person to win four major marathons — Chicago in 2009 and 2010, the 2008 Beijing Olympic marathon and London in 2009. Cleary, it was the right move for him.
A more cautionary tale might be found in the case of Atsede Baysa of Ethiopia, who won the women’s race at the Paris Marathon in April but quickly lost a 24-second lead in the late miles Sunday in Chicago and finished second, falling three minutes behind the winner, Liliya Shobukhova of Russia. Sunday’s race was the 14th marathon for Baysa, who is only 23.
Clearly, though, this surge of Ethiopians is not likely to abate soon.
“There are many coming and more to come,” said Federico Rosa, the agent for Wanjiru.
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