Haile Gebrselassie: “If I had had the shoes I have now in 2008, I would have lost two hours”

Rosa Mota and Haile Gebrselassie take the stage. The story of the marathon in two small, vivid, restless bodies. The two, legendary runners, will run this Sunday in Madrid. The Ethiopian will be one of the 21,000 participants in the 21,097.5 meters of the Half Marathon sponsored by Telefónica in its centenary; The Portuguese, injured in a hamstring, will only dare to do the ProFuturo race, 5,800 meters. They both have stories to tell. One speaks, the other does not.

Like her contemporary Carmen Valero in Spain, Mota, from Porto, 65, symbolizes the fight of women to be recognized as capable of running a marathon, something discussed by the man who dominates federations and committees until recently. Mota was already European champion in 1982, in the first official competition in which women were admitted in the distance of 42.195 kilometers, and in the first Olympic marathon, Los Angeles 84, she was a bronze medalist. Then she was world champion in Rome 87 and Olympic champion, finally, in Seoul 88. She continues running and says that for her running is like Facebook, the place where she finds friends everywhere, but she refuses to talk about her beginnings, to tell why he decided to run, as if his humility prohibited him from feeling like the protagonist of an epic. “I will talk about anything, except about myself,” warns a woman who in her competitive life, until she was 43 years old, has run 21 marathons, the fastest in 2h 23m 29s, still a record in Portugal (and would have been a record in Spain until four months ago) and has won in London, Boston and Chicago. “I have never wanted to talk about myself and I am not going to change now.”

Haile Gebrselassie and Rosa Mota, on the phone last Thursday.

Gebrselassie, one of the greatest known distance runners, which symbolizes the almost revolutionary transformation that the marathon has undergone.

In 2005, when he had only run one marathon, Haile Gebrselassie, already 50 years old, discovered in Almería the taste of the first raf tomatoes, the authentic ones, those grown in dunghills, and almost 20 years later he still remembers their flavor, both as he remembers, almost with a nostalgic sigh, his first marathon, London 2002, which he finished third (2h 6m 35s, an Ethiopian record and in which all he drank was water. Prehistory. Former world record holder and still third in the all-time list of both 10,000m (26m 22.75s) and 5,000m (12m 39.36s) with marks from 1998, he is only 33rd on the marathon list with the mark of 2h 3m 59s with which he broke the world record in Berlin in 2008. "Of course, my specialty was the 5,000m and 10,000m, a distance in which I won in two Olympic Games. I only passed the marathon at the end, at the age of 29," says Gebrselassie, a prosperous businessman. in Addis Ababa and owner of several hotels. He has not run a marathon since he retired and has also forgotten his aspirations to be president of Ethiopia. “For three years I was the only one who went under 2h 4m. But now the marathon is crazy. Every time we run faster, faster, faster, thanks to a few things, but especially one, the shoes. They are amazing now. I go out now, I do about 20 kilometers a day, with the new models, and with them I don't run, I fly." And he supports his words, expressed with dryness, sharpness, and a “

believe

me

” just in case, with his hand gesture imitating the takeoff of a plane.

Of the 32 that precede Gebrselassie on a list headed by the world record of 2h 35s that the recently deceased Kelvin Kiptum established in 2023 – “His death so early made me feel very sad,” he says. "Young. Accident. What can you say? Very badly. Very badly. It makes me so sad… It's incredible” – only four achieved their marks before August 2016, the Rio Olympic Games in which Nike, under the feet of Eliud Kipchoge, introduced the Vaporfly, the shoes made of carbon plates and foams. light on thick soles that transformed athletics. Between 2019 and 2023, four marathoners went under 2h 2m, six more under 2h 3m, and 23 under 2h 4m. “Even if Kiptum is dead, I'm sure the two-hour barrier will fall soon,” he says.

–Seeing these data, I suppose that perhaps you would have preferred to have been born 20 years later, to be now 30 and to become the first athlete under two hours, a feat that will make your protagonist immortal.

–Believe me, if in 2008, when I ran in 2h 3m 59s, I had run with the shoes I have now and not with the ones I used then, I would have been the first to do it in less than two hours, hahahaha.

–Four minutes less just for the sneakers? And his 2008 Adidas were considered revolutionary…

–”And the training! I know very well how they train now, believe me, and my training, compared to yours, was very hard, very hard.”

Like an old glory that he feels he was and that refuses to stop being, Gebrselassie, and everyone, remembers the last 200m, his furious sprint against Paul Tergat, in the Olympic 10,000m final in Sydney 2000, talks about the advantages you have now. "Everything is different. For example, on my debut in the London Marathon, when I came third, from start to finish I only drank water. Nothing else. Just water. And in Berlin I launched a kind of very simple energy drink, just little more than water,” he says, referring to the revolution in race nutrition, with the creation of drinks with 100 and 120 grams of easily digestible carbohydrates in the race that allow the runner never runs out of energy. “But, ah, the sneakers are the best.”

If Gebrselassie accepts the benefits of some of the factors that have revolutionized the marathon, with others he is intransigent. He does not believe that it is good for young athletes, like Kiptum, who between the ages of 22 and 23 ran three marathons in less than 2h 2m, to dedicate themselves to the marathon without having previously strengthened their body on the track, and nor, of course, believes that doping is a good thing. “Yes, there is a lot of doping now,” he says, accepting that in both Kenya and Ethiopia dozens of positives are detected every year. “Athletes can never seem to feel satisfied. Never. They are very selfish. I do not understand them. They have the shoes, which give them much more than doping can give them, but they need more, they want to have more. Not good. It's bad for the sport. Bad for athletics. The international federation should investigate more, and WADA do even more controls. If not, I don't know where we're going to end up."

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