'Ritz' putting it on

By Len Johnson

Watching Dathan Ritzenhein run his US record 12:56.27 for 5000 metres in Zurich a week ago, I was as excited as the next person.

It wasn't just the result _ grand enough on its own anyway. It was the manner in which Ritzenhein achieved it. Laying off the early pace, the American worked his way through from last place in the second half of the race, picking off runner after runner until, at the bell, he had moved past Edwin Soi of Kenya into second and was even threatening Kenenisa Bekele.

Briefly threatening Kenenisa Bekele, that is: the Ethiopian great may have slowed a little after being left on his own at 3k, but he had more than enough left to spurt clear again in the final 400 metres to win in 12:52.32, fastest time in the world this year.

Soi, winner of the 3000/5000 double at the 2007 World Athletics Final, found sufficient closing speed to re-pass Ritzenhein for second place.

That still left a pretty significant set of numbers to go with Ritzenhein's third place finish: the US record, a personal best by 20 seconds, the first non-African runner to go under 13 minutes since Craig Mottram in 2006 ('Buster' also did it in 2004 and 2005), and the first to look like beating Bekele at 3000, or above, since the lanky Australian actually did so in the World Cup 3000 metres in Athens in 2006. (Of course, Eritrea's Zersenay Tadese also beat Bekele at cross-country, taking his world title off him in Mombasa in 2007.)

It was the 'threat' which grabbed our attention in Zurich. Few athletes have come at Bekele in a track distance race since 2006, much less threatened to beat him. Like Mottram did against Haile Gebrselassie in 2004 and Bekele in 2005 and 2006, Ritzenhein showed that white men can still run. Along with another American, Matt Tegenkamp, fourth in the 2007 Osaka 5000, these three have shown that the difference is not genetic, not geographic, not high altitude. It's just a matter of having similar talent and working just as hard.

Here's a 'what if', though. What if instead of threatening to inflict a rare defeat on the greatest track distance runner of all time, instead of breaking the US record, or even 13 minutes, instead of finishing third in Zurich, what if Ritzenhein had finished merely seventh, between Kenyans Joseph Ebuya (13:00) and Moses Masai (13:06). A 'pb' by 10-15 seconds, a competitive result similar to his sixth place in the 10,000 in Berlin, a significant charge through the field from last place albeit not as spectacular as last to second at the bell.

Would we still have been just as excited watching this from the Letzgrund press seats, or on live stream for those lucky enough to get it, or reading about it a few hours later? Probably not, but I'd argue that we should be. Because before more American, more Australian and _ hopefully _ some Europeans can start bridging the gap to the Kenyans, Ethiopians, Ugandans and Eritreans, they first must start running personal bests and we must start acknowledging them for doing so.

I wrote in last year's Zatopek program that we had forgotten about the humble personal best in our obsession with whether a performance qualifies an athlete for the next championship. It should not be forgotten, for example, that before Craig Mottram ran his national record 12:55.76 a step behind Gebrselassie in London in 2004, he successively ran personal bests of 13:10 and 13:03, the former of these two some 200 metres behind Bekele's world record 12:37.35.

When Ron Clarke was running distance world records with even greater regularity than Usain Bolt is doing now, he told an interviewer that he did not think of his performances as world records, it was just a personal best which happened to be a world record.

The gap between Kenenisa Bekele and the rest of the world is a gulf right now, impossible to bridge in one jump. Dathan Ritzenhein is the latest of a handful of examples to show that it can be closed though, one personal best at a time. As distance running fans, we should get excited about our own athletes running personal bests because it could just be the first step back to world-class.

And it's a heap better than not even trying.


 

Len Johnson was The Melbourne Age athletics writer for over 20 years, covering five Olympics, 10 world championships and five Commonwealth Games. He is the author of The Landy Era, From Nowhere to the Top of the World, and a former national class distance runner (2.19.32 marathon) who trained with Chris Wardlaw and Robert de Castella.