Mohamed Katir achieves a historic bronze for Spain in a frenetic 1,500 meters in Oregon

A fiery final was announced, with no options for the opportunists who took advantage of the compact groups on the finish line to surprise the favourites.

In this type of race, the ones where you squeeze and squeeze from start to finish, so painful for those who run them, but so beautiful for the spectator, the Spanish Mohamed Katir was well placed among the medal candidates.

And the expectations, so treacherous at times, were fulfilled by heart.

The race was launched —2m 20s passing through the 1,000 meters—, and Katir, 24, who arrived as a kid from Morocco and settled in a town in Murcia called Mula, without an athletics track, won for Spain the second bronze medal at the Oregon World Championship (3m 29.90s), the first for the 1,500 meters since Reyes Estévez's bronze in Seville 1999.

The joys did not end there.

Mario García Romo, who crushed his personal record (3m 30.20s, five seconds less than the previous one), was fourth, and made it clear that the future of the national midfielder will not depend only on Katir's genius.

The third Spaniard in the running, Ignacio Fontes, who a priori would have benefited from a slower race, was eleventh.

💥This end of the 1,500-meter race is already the history of Spanish athletics (@atletismoRFEA):

Mohamed Katir, bronze medal 🥉

Mario García, 4th.

Ignacio Fontes, 11th.

👉 All the information at https://t.co/E6WUGJO9Pt#WorldAthleticsChamps #EspañaAtletismo pic.twitter.com/8zZR1F4qdJ

– Telesport (@telesport) July 20, 2022

If the pace of the race met the predictions, the opposite happened with the gold.

The British Jake Wightman (3m 29.23s) broke the pools and beat the Norwegian Jakob Ingebrigtsen, (3m 29.47s) the great favorite.

He thus becomes the first European to win since his compatriot Steve Cram did it in Helsinki 1983. Another life.

Ingebrigtsen tried again, as it happened to him on the indoor track of the Belgrade World Cup in March, the taste of silver in a great championship, so bitter for someone who at 21 years of age can only conceive of winning.

Even worse was the situation for the Kenyans, who after five consecutive editions monopolizing the gold, had to settle for sixth place for Timothy Cheruiyot and seventh for Abel Kipsang, five Europeans preceding them.

The world upside down.

The three Spaniards in the final of the men's 1,500 meters: Ignacio Fontes, Mo Katir and Mario García Romo, at the end of the race. JEAN-CHRISTOPHE BOTT (EFE)

The final, at half past seven in the evening local time, began with thermometers hovering around 30 degrees.

Eugene gets tired of being a city of perennial spring and thus succumbs to the summer heat for the first time in the championship.

The trio of the Spanish team arrives at Hayward Field at 5:40 p.m., almost two hours earlier, Katir uncovered, Fontes and García Romo, wearing sunglasses.

The latter, who has been watching the Gladiator movie earlier to motivate himself, is holding a bottle.

Hydration against embarrassment.

Is it possible to beat Ingebrigtsen?

“If it doesn't finish in 3m 27s, yes”, jokes the man from Salamanca, who doesn't seem to be afraid of anyone.

Once the starting gun is fired, the fray begins with the Kenyan Kipsang scoring all the partials in the lead, his countryman Cheruiyot very close.

The most advanced Spaniard is García Romo in the middle of the group, while Katir, as he had decided before starting —he will explain later— chooses to stay at the back to save his strength.

Halfway through the race, Katir climbed up the rankings to eighth place and closed in on García Romo, sixth.

The man from Salamanca is a strategist like few others in the placement.

A devourer of the videos of the great championships — he claims to have seen those held in the last 30 years — just to study how the myths of distance move on the track.

And he shows.

Meanwhile, up front, Ingebrigtsen pulls on his stripes and takes the lead, with Cheruiyot breathing next to him.

There he passes the 1,000m, 1,100, 1,200... And he never comes back.

The British Jake Wightman, who arrives with the fourth best time of the season, takes the lead, takes over the first lane, blocking her path, and does not let her go.

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Back, hostilities break out.

In the last 300m, Katir overtakes García Romo, and the two go forward, brave, now or never, in search of medals.

Metal and glory separate them, when 200 meters remain, the two Kenyans and the British Josh Kerr.

The three succumb to the powerful finish of the Spanish, and Katir, who manages to open a gap inside lane 1 touching Cheruiyot, and whose legs begin to hurt when there are 60 meters left —as he will say later—, obtains his first medal in a major championship.

Thus, now in the melee with the best on the planet, he confirms what the brands already said about him —he snatched the Spanish record from Fermín Cacho last year, 3m 28.76s—: that he is called to lead a generation of the 1,500 meters Spanish.

Finishing the exam with flying colors, the medal around his neck, Katir arrives with a broad smile, and decides, euphoric, to take sides in one of the debates that appear and disappear between the athletes.

"This feels better than having a record," he launches, still on cloud nine.

He remembers his father, who signed him up for a football team when he arrived in Spain, but since he didn't like kicking a ball, he changed it to another athletics team when at the age of 12, after a school career in the Mulasport club, they saw conditions.

“They told me: you have a good plant, talk to your father and if he is determined, go to athletics.

I talked to my father, he bet on me, and today I am third in the world”, says Katir, still incredulous, summarizing in a couple of sentences, as if it were simple, the work of more than a decade of grinding against the clock.

Katir had one of those days where the body responds without complaint.

“At first I found brutal sensations.

I could have endured whatever pace they would have set”, he assures, convinced.

And García Romo had it, 23 years old, born in Villar de Gallimazo, (Salamanca), 200 registered, graduated in Chemistry from the University of Mississippi, tanned on the slopes of the American university circuit, and when he reached the finish line he threw his hands to the head.

Of joy or rage?

“A bit of both.

I have seen myself with the bronze because I was taking people in the last 100 ″, she affirms, with a look much more happy than hurt for being the first of those who run out of metal.

"If it wasn't me, I wanted it to be another Spaniard," he says generously, looking at Katir, ruminating on new goals just a few minutes after the heat in the tartan, drunk with athletics and lactic.

"My goal has always been to be Olympic gold, and Paris is on the horizon."

Before, in less than a month, there will be the opportunity to endorse the performance at the European Championships in Munich.