Ethiopian athletes fight over Olympics slots
The Olympic Games don’t come around every other year and it is every athlete’s dream to win a medal on the world’s biggest sporting stage.
It, therefore, hardly comes as a surprise that in Addis Ababa, the heat over selection to next month’s Beijing Olympics is at fever pitch and even degenerated to a physical fight at the weekend between two of the country’s finest women’s marathon runners. Ethiopia’s national athletics training programme has traditionally been a closely guarded secret but it is now emerging that world one-hour record holder Dire Tune and fellow marathon runner Bezunesh Bekele faced off in a physical confrontation before their early-morning training session on Thursday.
The athletes are both vying for the last selection place in Ethiopia’s marathon squad and reports indicate that they were involved in a heated conversation as to who deserved a place in the country’s Olympic squad.
Bekele is currently ranked ahead in the season’s Ethiopian lists, while Tune is the athlete in form following her world one-hour breaking effort in Ostrava in June. No serious injuries were reported from the incident.
In Ethiopia, a country struggling with poverty, many inspiring athletes remain a living example that athletics is paying and have since changed their lives ever since winning medals at the Olympics. Meseret Defar, Tirunesh Dibaba, the legendary Haile Gebrselassie and multiple world record holder Kenenisa Bekele have all raked in huge amounts of money through athletics and are sources of inspiration to upcoming runners.
Ethiopia’s success in women’s athletics started with Africa’s first track gold medallist, Derartu Tulu, a 10,000m winner at the Barcelona Games in 1992.
The feat elevated her to the league of Ethiopia’s distance greats like Abebe Bikila, Mamo Wolde and Miruts Yifter.
Meanwhile, despite having been named in the Ethiopian 10,000m team, world marathon record holder Haile Gebrselassie remains doubtful for the Beijing games.
The 35-year old two-time 10,000m Olympic champion has a torn calf muscle and is unsure whether he will compete. Gebrselassie has continued his training on soft grass yet unable to do track sessions.
But Gebrselassie will run the Berlin marathon in September for a third straight year after shattering the world record in the German capital last year, organisers said on Tuesday.
Gebrselassie’s time of two hours four minutes and 26 seconds eclipsed the previous record of 2:04.55 set by his friend and rival Paul Tergat of Kenya on the same Berlin course in 2003.
Gebrselassie decided not to run the Olympics marathon because of worries about the pollution in Beijing and will instead run the Berlin marathon on September 28.
The other athletes in Ethiopia’s 10,000m team are champion Kenenisa Bekele, Sileshi Sihine and Ibrahim Jeylan a bronze medallist in the world junior championship in Poland recently. As expected, world junior 5,000m champion, Abraham Cherkos, won a place in the 5,000m alongside the Bekele brothers, with Kenenisa expected to attempt a 5,000m-10,000m double.
Likewise on the women’s side there is room for Tirunesh Dibaba to double although it is still expected that the fourth-named athletes (Dibaba, Meseret Defar, Meselech Melkamu, Belaynesh Fekadu ) will go to Beijing as travelling reserve.
The exact make-up of Ethiopian athletes entered for the marathon races is yet to be finalized, with the women’s squad of four (Gete Wami, Berhane Adere, Bezunesh Bekele, Dire Tune) remaining one of the harder outstanding choices for the selectors.
Meanwhile Zimbabwe has unveiled a team of seven athletes for the Beijing Olympics. The squad has sprinter Brian Dzingai, quarter-milers Young Talkmore Nyongani and Lewis Banda, distance runners Cutbert Nyasango, Mike Fokorani and Tabitha Tsatsa, the only woman in the selection as well as NCAA long jump champion Ngonidzashe Makusha. The best chances lie with Makusha and Dzingai who are respectively ranked 9th (8.30m) and 10th (20.17) in the world top lists this season.
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