As good as gold: Hicham El Guerrouj

By PETER JESSUP

Hicham El Guerrouj is as close to a sure thing as you ever get in sport. The Moroccan holds a huge mortgage on the Sydney Olympic 1500m gold medal.

El Guerrouj has not been beaten at the distance since his world fell apart when he tripped in the second-to-last straight of the Atlanta Games 1500m. He has since not broken but rather shattered all middle-distance running records.

"He needs this medal," said Aziz Daoudar, the technical director of Morocco's elite athlete scheme. "He is the world record holder, the world champion. He can't miss this. If he does it will be a big problem. Psychologically, it will be the end of his career.'

It is highly unlikely that he will lose. Hicham El Guerrouj, pronounced "Hee-Shum El Garoosh," has a photograph of his Atlanta tumble pinned to the wall in the two-room apartment block inside the athletes' compound in the Moroccan capital of Rabat where he lives, and looks at it every day. "It doesn't hurt so much now but I remember."

Beside it is a framed parchment with the 16 signatures of all those alive who have broken the world mile record, his signature the last. The parchment was forwarded by the British Athletic Association, which asked him to sign another that will be presented to the next man who breaks the record. El Guerrouj believes that it will be him.

El Guerrouj, who turns 26 on Thursday, was born to a middle-class family in Berkane, an orange-growing area near the Mediterranean, climate akin to Southern California. He was the middle son of a family of three boys and four girls, and father Ayaki was the owner of a small restaurant. As a child, he used to run from home to the restaurant to get the family fresh-baked bread. "Be back in four minutes," was the call. His hero was 5000m gold winner Said Aouita and when a track official spotted his talent at the age of 14 and wanted him to move to the oceanside capital of Rabat, he placated his mother with the promise that he, too, would win gold.

As he grew older he focused on the 1500m, a picture of then reigning world champ Algerian Nourredine Morceli always in his wallet. Morceli enjoyed a six-year unbeaten run to Atlanta.

The torch has since changed hands. In 1994, the 19-year-old El Guerrouj ran 3m 33.61s. In 1995, he came second to Morceli at the world champs in Gothenburg. Then came the 1996 Games.

El Guerrouj believed that he could take Morceli with 400m to go. A knee flicked a calf, the pair tangled, the Moroccan fell. He picked himself up to run on and finish 12th while Morceli won the gold.

Afterwards he collapsed in tears out the back of the Atlanta Braves stadium, inconsolable. Then his coach brought over a mobile phone. It was King Hassan II calling.

The King, who has since died of a lung infection, told El Guerrouj that he was a champion in the eyes of the 30 million people of Morocco and that he must persevere.

In his next meeting with Morceli he won the IAAF final in Milan. Then came the 1500m world record in Rome in July 1998 - 3m 26s. In July last year, he lowered the world mile record by 1.26s to 3m 43.13s. In September he ran a competitive 3000m for the first time and returned the second-fastest time in history, 7m 23.09s. Later that month he broke the world 2000m record by a full 3s, taking it down to 4m 44.79s.

"He will run 3.24 for the 1500 and 3.40 for the mile," his coach Abel Kada has confidently predicted.
El Guerrouj is blessed with the right body type, the right genes for what he does. His body is unusually shaped, long runners' legs and a short mid-section. At 1.75m tall, he has been described as having the cardio-vascular system of a man of 2m, the legs of a man of 1.90m and the torso of a man of 1.6m. Medical tests have proved he has huge lung capacity to convert oxygen for the blood supply. The pace-setters who run him at training have no doubt of this.

El Guerrouj runs twice a day, a gut-bursting sequence of increasingly longer distances from 200m to 1000m to start. Then follows a repetitive stretch, sometimes 10 times over 1000m, two minutes between and all within 2m 33s, sometimes five times over 2000m. This requires as many as four other runners, all of whom are left in a screaming heap, gasping for air, as he continues. Sometimes he drags a tyre, sometimes he runs with a weighted jacket. All this is fuelled on bread and boiled eggs for breakfast, salad for lunch. But he eats the menu for dinner, apparently.

El Guerrouj spent the past nine months in camp at the elite athlete altitude training facility at Ifrane in the Atlas mountains. He has a fiancee but sees her about once a month. Each day it is praying, training, sleeping, training, praying, eating, sleeping. It is a spartan existence and he likes it. "If I don't stay in my environment I won't be as good. I want to be close to the people, to live a simple life. In my country there are many poor people. You can't be bigger than the others."

The average wage in Morocco is $US25 a month, half the population cannot read or write. The runner is reputed to have made $US6 million ($14 million) from sponsorships including from Nike, the clothing giant handing over the $US50,000 it promised its sponsored athletes if they won gold at Atlanta despite his fall, Berlin meet organisers adding a 1kg gold bar for breaking the world record. But he owns little more than a TV and stereo and a new Honda 4WD, barely driven.

Not at all brash, not given to outlandish claims or wild predictions, El Guerrouj is aiming to hold all world records between 1500m and 5000m.

"If I had won at Atlanta then maybe that would have finished my career.

"Now it makes me work harder."