In for the long haul
AFFLUENCE, if it ever reaches that continent, may be the only hope there is of ending the African dominance of middle and long distance running. That's the view of legendary Olympian Lasse Viren as Helsinki braces itself for another assault on the world championship medal treasury spearheaded by the young Ethiopian sensation,
Kenenisa Bekele.
Double Olympic champion Hicham El Guerrouj and Haile Gebrselassie who also has two Olympic gold medals from separate Games and dominated the 10,000m at the world championships from 1993 until he was dethroned by Bekele in Paris in 2003 will be absent over the coming week but that will only make way for others.
"They have so much talent in Africa," Viren pointed out. "The present situation in those countries is that you can succeed in society through sports and the standard of living is so low that this has to be a huge encouraging factor for them."
Over the past decade or more the world of athletics has been struggling to put new names to new faces as an amazing wealth of talent overflowing from the bottomless well that is Africa.
Last year in Athens only a surprise bronze medal performance in the 1,500m from Portugal's Rui Silva prevented a total sweep of all the medals between 1,500m and 10,000m.
Only Craig Mottram from Australia (8th) and Ireland's Alistair Cragg (12th) figured in the final of the 5,000m while in the 10,000m final only Ismael Sghyr of France (8th) he was born in Morocco and Dan Browne from the USA (12th) made any notable impression.
The top eight in the 5,000m and 10,000m finals at the world championships in Paris were African, while France's silver medallist in the 1,500m, Mehdi Baala, prevented another clean sweep.
"Obviously they are all very talented," Viren said. "But it is a clear advantage to be born at altitude and to live at altitude. To get the same result we have to go up and train at altitude but even then it is not the same.
Another major factor raising the level of the runners is that they have such heavy domestic competition. They have to fight very hard for places in their events. That automatically raises the standard as well.
Success breeds success.
"That happened to us in Finland back in the 1970s.
Whether or not they would have been able to compete against the likes of Gebrselassie and Bekele was a hypothetical question but he said he would love to have had the opportunity.
"It's an ifs and buts thing. We are talking about a different era, about different tactics and about a scene that is very different," he said.
"We have two categories of competition nowadays. You have the major competitions like the world championships and the Olympic Games and then you have a very different category where they run just to get fast times and world records and the Africans enjoy this." He admitted that there are some athletes who are willing to take them on and that in recent times those outsiders have been able to expose chinks in their armour.
"Maybe it is slowly changing," he said. "There is somebody from
Ireland (Alistair Cragg) and another athlete from Australia (Craig
Mottram) who have been there with them this year. You need that kind of belief that you are equal if you are to break the deadlock.
"I think maybe the Kenyans are the most vulnerable. They have become fragmented and they do not run as a team any more not like the Ethiopians. It is very difficult to beat them if they run as a team."
He said that if other athletes were to take on the Africans and beat them, they also needed to train at altitude and match them in determination.
Viren himself was once invincible when it came to the Olympics. That time there were no world championships, and he had very little exposure in between the Games. But like the legendary discus thrower Al Oerter, the stimulus of Olympic competition brought out the best in him.
He retired after achieving the famous "double double" at the Montreal Olympics in 1976, when he retained the 5,000m and 10,000m titles he had won four years earlier in Munich.
He failed in his bid to emulate Emil Zatopek's 1952 Helsinki treble when he made his marathon debut the day after the 5,000m final and, under the circumstances, ran a sensational 2:13:11. That won Viren fifth place behind former East German steeplechase champion turned marathon runner Waldemar Cierpinski, who knocked more than four minutes from his previous best to win the title in 2:09:55.
While he failed to equal Zatopek's achievement, his times were far superior. He ran 28:14.95 in his heat of the 10,000m, 27:40.38 in the final three days later, then 13:33.39 in his 5,000m heat and 13:24.76 in the final the day before he ran 2:13:11 in the marathon.
He was re-introducing if not maintaining a great Finnish tradition which sadly is no longer part of world athletics. Between 1912 and 1936 there were 12 Olympic 5,000m and 10,000m races and ten of them were won by runners from Finland Hannes Kolehmainen, the legendary Paao Nurmi, Ville Ritola, Lauri Lehtinen, Gunnar Hockert and Ilmarfi Salminen.
It was the early 70s before the status quo was re-established, led by Juha Vaatainen who won both the 5,000m and 10,000m titles at the European championships in Helsinki in 1971 when Viren finished seventh in the 5,000m and 17th in the 10,000m.
Viren was born in Myrskyla in 1949 and made a name for himself in 1967 with Finnish age-group records over 3,000m and 5,000m before winning the national senior 5,000m title at the age of 20.
At the Munich Olympics in 1972 he was sensational: in the 10,000m final he tripped and fell, picked himself up, chased the leaders and caught them and eventually won the gold medal in a new world record time of 27:38.35 ahead of the great Belgian, Emiel Puttemans, and Ethiopian Miruts Yifter, who would return eight years later to write his own piece of history with a 5,000m/ 10,000m double in Moscow.
After he retained his 10,000m in Montreal Lasse Viren was quizzed by the press about the practice of blood boosting. It was not illegal at the time and involved the extraction of blood from a runner and re-injecting it before a major competition to increase the haemoglobin level and improve the oxygen carrying capability. Viren denied ever having been involved in the practice, pointing out that his training was all geared towards peaking for the Olympics.
When we met in Helsinki he spoke of his training regime. In fact he was before his time in much of his methods, travelling to Africa and South America to train at altitude and to Spain for warm weather training.
"I trained in many places. I trained in Spain, I trained in Kenya and I trained in South America," he said, but his favourite stomping ground was in the forests of Finland.
"The tranquility of nature creates mental strength. When you run in the woods you will have to change rhythm to avoid roots just in the same way as you have to be constantly alert in competitions.
"The humus layer developed through the years gives elasticity to the natural path and I never had, even during my active career, any foot injuries."
A myth of high mileage was build up around the amazing Finn but he only smiles when you mention this: "When I was going through basic training then the mileage was high, but it would be much lower when I would be finalising my preparations.
"You see, you cannot say that a lot of mileage will guarantee better results. That is not true at all. Every individual is different.
"There were a number of runners at home who would run more than I did but their results were not the same. But there has to be a balance between training and rest periods. You run too many miles and that is a mistake."
He said the abuse of drugs in sport was one of the biggest challenges facing athletics and the time had come to either adopt a zero tolerance approach or total freedom.
He was elected to the Finnish Parliament in 1999 and now the former policeman does much of his running between committee meetings. When we spoke to him it was a particularly busy day the day before the start of the summer recess.
"I am looking forward to the world championships," he said. "I am not on any organising committee or anything like that but I am part of the Honorary Committee of the World Championships."
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