HE has broken 27 world records, won two Olympic gold medals and four World Championship titles and is widely acknowledged as the greatest long-distance runner of all time.

But when he limbers up at the start of his maiden Great North Run in September, Haile Gebrselassie will be no different to the 53,999 runners lining up alongside him.


Like most of them, he will have squeezed his training around a full-time job that commands his attention from 9-5. He will have questioned whether, at the age of 37, his legs are still as powerful and productive as they used to be. And he will be eagerly anticipating the enthusiastic support of the crowd as he enters the final gruelling miles of the world’s biggest halfmarathon.

The difference, of course, is that while the vast majority of the field will be happy to complete the course, Gebrselassie is out to make history. Having won every major long-distance title going, the Ethiopian legend is determined to complete the set.

But for all that he has carved out a deserved reputation as one of the most iconic figures in world sport, his love of running comes from the same place it did when he first took up competitive athletics 18 years ago. Almost two decades on, the passion remains undimmed.

“I could stay in Ethiopia and run my businesses, but most of my life is related to running,” said Gebrselassie, who is a former world halfmarathon champion and record holder.

“I want to keep running for as long as possible. I want to keep training, I want to get out there and sweat. I need all of that and the competitions are important because they give you a focus.

“It is all about the people.

If I didn’t race, I would miss the supporters and the other runners. When you don’t run competitively, there is something missing, it is the cheers that you miss.

“I am just like the rest of the runners. We do it for the crowds and for the people cheering you on – that is the sport, that is what athletics means to me.

“When you start athletics and you start to compete, the thing that brings you along on the journeys are the crowds. When you’re tired and you hear someone from the crowd saying ‘You can do it’ – that just spurs you on. I love it, it is my motivation.”

Gebrselassie has experienced North-East crowds before. He competed in the World Cross-Country Championships in Durham in 1995 and four years later he won the Emsley Carr Mile at the Gateshead International Stadium.

But somewhat suprisingly, he is yet to experience the colour and drama of the Great North Run.

He was supposed to appear on Tyneside in 2000, only for an Achilles injury sustained during the final of the Olympic 10,000m – when he beat Paul Tergat in one of the most thrilling longdistance finishes of all time – to scupper his hopes of returning to the North-East.

As a result, the Great North Run crown is one of the few major titles missing from his back catalogue, an anomaly he is hoping to correct on September 19.

“It is a wonderful and great event,” he said. “As an athlete, it is a race you cannot miss in your career. I knew I had to run it before I stop competing seriously and while I still have a chance of winning it.

“The priority is to win the race and get in the history book. Brendan Foster gave me a book celebrating the race and I was flicking through it today thinking, ‘He won it, oh, he won it’, but my name was not there. I want to be in the book of this great race. It is the only book on running I’ve not got my name in!”

To enhance his prospects of success, Gebrselassie is about to embark on a gruelling training schedule that will see him rise at 5.30am and run 35km before travelling to his Addis Ababa office for a full day of work.

He will then return to his gym to run a further 10km on the treadmill, cycle 10km on an exercise bike and complete a series of punishing drills on the weights.

He will repeat this schedule seven days a week, expect for Sundays when the morning run will suffice. As a result, he will run more than 220 miles every week.

His passion for athletics is incredible, but even it is eclipsed by his love for his native Ethiopia.

Not content with inspiring a golden generation of Ethiopian athletes – the country has produced Kenenisa Bekele, who won the 5,000m and 10,000m Olympic titles in Beijing, and Tirunesh Dibaba, who claimed the same double in the women’s events – Gebrselassie is helping to transform the infrastructure of a country that remains one of the most impoverished in the world.

He runs businesses ranging from hotels and fitness centres to cinemas and car dealerships, and employs more than 600 people. He has also opened two schools that educate more than 1,200 students, with more than 80 per cent of those pupils going into higher education, as opposed to the national average of less than ten.

“Everybody knows that I have an opportunity to invest my money all over the world, but because I am doing it in Ethiopia, hopefully it will help,” said Gebrselassie. “It is not big enough for a whole country, but hopefully it will help a little bit and show others what is possible.

“I can see a lot of progress and a lot of change. Right now, things are going well in Ethiopia. But it is not easy in a country that is effectively coming up from zero. We still need time.”