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Caught Ngeny overtakes El Guerrouj to win men's 1,500Posted: Thursday September 28, 2000 12:00 AM
SYDNEY, Australia (CNNSI.com) -- The man many consider the prototypical middle-distance runner for the next century finished the Sydney Games without a gold medal to validate his greatness. Trying to erase the hurt of a last-lap crash that stole his chance to win the 1,500 meters at the 1996 Games, world record-holder Hicham El Guerrouj, from Morocco, got ambushed by Kenyan Noah Ngeny over the final few meters. A silver medal turned out to be little consolation. As the scoreboard flashed Ngeny's winning time of 3:32.07 -- an Olympic record -- El Guerrouj sat on the track in stunned silence, drawing his knees up toward his chest. As three dozen of his countrymen shouted comforting words or simply wept, Ngeny and fellow Kenyan Bernard Lagat, the bronze medalist, walked over to El Guerrouj, bent down and embraced him. Moments later, El Guerrouj walked silently through a gauntlet of reporters beneath the stands, took his seat on a bench and doubled over, the pain escaping his slender frame in powerful shivers.
For 10 minutes, as first the Moroccan team doctor and then his coach, Abdel Kada, did their best to console him, El Guerrouj wept. All the while, camera shutters whirred and clicked. It was an all too-familiar tableau. Four years ago in Atlanta, the 26-year-old tangled with Noureddine Morceli at the start of the bell lap, clipped the Algerian's heel with his knee and crashed to the track. Shouldering the burden of an entire nation, he finished dead last. Bent and broken, El Guerrouj hid beneath the grandstand and, with his face in his hands, sobbed uncontrollably. His shattered hopes were captured in a photo that El Guerrouj has awakened to every morning since, whether in his spartan dormitory room at the Morroccan national training center in Rabat or in the sitting room of his more spacious abode nearby. Running made him a millionaire several times over since, but what El Guerrouj said he wanted more than anything else was a photo to replace that one. Now, he'll have to wait until 2004 for the chance. "A lot of people expected him to win," Lagat said. "That gives someone a lot of pressure." Most of that, El Guerrouj put on himself. Since 1996, he set world records in both the 1,500 and the mile, with Ngeny pushing him to the finish line a half-dozen times, but never beating him until Friday night. No one had since the end of 1997, and the gold-medal race looked like it was going to be just another in that series. El Guerrouj tracked fellow Moroccan Youssef Baba through the first lap, took control a lap and a half later and made the turn into the final stretch with the lead. Stalking him, the Kenyans made their move with the finish line only strides away. "I don't know what happened," Lagat said. "We went into the race and it was not very fast to begin with. At the end, we picked up the pace and maybe that was not good for him." Ngeny and Lagat embraced their Moroccan rival one final time on the medal stand. "For a Kenyan to make the mile gold medal is very big," Ngeny said. "When I go back home, it will be amazing." For El Guerrouj, it will be something less than that. Instead of one photo to remind him, now there are two. The Associated Press contributed to this report.
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