Track: 1500m favourite flattened

By EUGENE BINGHAM

Hicham El Guerrouj , the 1500m hot favourite, had gold snatched from him for the second consecutive Games in the biggest shock of the track and field programme on Friday night.

It was not supposed to be like this. The Moroccan superstar, triple world champion and holder of three world records had come to Sydney for the victory denied him when he fell in the final at Atlanta four years ago.

He awoke to his second Olympic nightmare when he glanced right 50m from the line, just in time to watch Kenya's Noah Ngeny blaze past. Head back, eyes wide and mouth gasping for air, Ngeny was uncatchable, zooming to a victory nobody, least of all El Guerrouj, anticipated.

The result, in an Olympic record time courtesy of El Guerrouj's hot pace, was a genuine boilover.

Ngeny and his fellow Kenyan, bronze medallist Bernard Lagat, snatched their flag from the crowd and jogged around the track in a victory lap El Guerrouj believed would be his.

The 26-year-old was slumped on the track. Competitors came to pay their respects and console the fallen one.

When it became too much, he retreated underneath the stadium, sprinting to the furthest place he could find. For the second Olympics, he sobbed uncontrollably.

Stunned Moroccan officials rallied around him, shielding him from cameras and helping him into his tracksuit. Finally, after minutes of crying, he pulled his head from his hands and went to leave.

Shifting his glance towards the crowd gathered just down the corridor, he broke down again, falling to his knees and crying with his head on the bench.

"I called my mother and my sister the day before yesterday and they asked me to run for the gold, but today it wasn't my day," he said.

Unlike Atlanta, where he tripped on the eventual winner, Noureddine Morceli, El Guerrouj had no one to blame but himself.

His team-mate, Youssef Baba, acted as a pace-maker, leading the field through 700m at a cracking pace with El Guerrouj tucked in behind. Then the master shifted to the front.

"I wanted to run world-record pace, but unfortunately it wasn't one of my great days," said El Guerrouj.

The field fell into single file - El Guerrouj, Ngeny, Lagat. The order remained the same until Ngeny did what he has been incapable of doing for the past four years - passing the Moroccan.

He stopped the clock in 3m 32.07s, the fastest Olympic time.

For so long, Ngeny has played second fiddle to El Guerrouj. Not on Friday night.

In winning, he became the latest in a line of champions from the African nation. The 21-year-old hails from Eldoret, a rural Kenyan town with a rich track heritage. He has followed the same trails as Moses Kiptanui, Daniel Komen and Kip Keino.

Now he has a gold and the scalp of one of the Olympic's hottest favourites.

El Guerrouj said he had been carrying a slight thigh injury sustained in the past few days, but he refused to use this as an excuse.

The pressure on him had been great, he said. "Before getting into the stadium tonight I already started crying unfortunately, but my coach and my manager were there and they told me to stop weeping."

Will he still be crying in four years time when he intends to run the 5000m at Athens?