BEIJING — Ethiopian track stars are all set to dominate the 5,000 and 10,000m events at the Beijing Olympics.
But a punishing schedule, a host of tough rivals and dubious air quality in the Chinese capital could hamper bids at a double by the leading male and female long-distance athletes, Kenenisa Bekele and Tirunesh Dibaba.
Bekele and Dibaba arrive in Beijing as the acknowledged king and queen over the two distances and any failure on their part to add to their already burgeoning medal collection would be an upset.
Bekele is the defending 10,000m champion and world record holder in that event and the 5,000m. He is triple world champion over the 10km race, and has also won Olympic silver (2004) and world bronze (2003) over the shorter event.
He will put his 10-race unbeaten streak in the 10,000m to the test against the likes of team-mates Haile Gebrselassie and Olympic silver medalist Sileshi Sihine.
Gebrselassie, who won the 10,000m gold medals in Atlanta in 1996 and Sydney in 2000 before slipping to fifth four years ago, has spurned any idea of running the marathon over concerns of bad air quality in the Chinese capital.
But Bekele played down the remarks of his 35-year-old team-mate, saying he had no real concerns over the pollution in Beijing.
“The problem of pollution will be the same for all the athletes competing there,” he said. “Beijing will be very different.”
In the 5000m, Bekele will lead a strong team of runners including younger brother Tariku, a world indoor 3000m gold medalist, recently-minted World junior champion Abraham Cherkos and African bronze medalist Ali Abdosh.
Bekele has attempted the grueling double twice before — at the 2003 world championships and the 2004 Olympics — and on each occasion, he won the 10,000m, but not the 5,000m.
“It’s very tough to run a double at the Olympics,” said Bekele, who was beaten by Hicham El-Guerrouj by 0.20sec to gold in the 5,000m in the Athens Games in 2004 a few days after his 10km showing.
“I ran many kilometers in a few days in Athens, and I lost a lot of power.”
This year, the men will race the final of the 10,000m on Aug. 17. Heats for the 5,000m take place three days later, with the final on Aug. 23.
The star-studded Ethiopian squad’s hopes of matching or surpassing the country’s best medal tally in the Olympic Games — eight medals (four gold, one silver, and three bronze) — set in Sydney 2000 will also ride on Dibaba.
While the double World 10,000m champion might face equally-motivated challengers as she attempts an unprecedented double in Beijing following her 5,000m bronze in Athens, no runner has come close to her this season.
After a third World Cross country gold in March and a first African 10,000m title shortly after, Dibaba sliced four and half seconds off compatriot Meseret Defar’s World 5,000m record in Oslo and is the firm favorite in both the 5,000m and 10,000m in Beijing.
This year Defar won a third successive World Indoor 3,000m title in Valencia in March and will go head-to head with Dibaba in the 5,000m should the latter feel no after effects from the 10,000m. In addition to Defar, Dibaba will have to keep an eye on the improving Meselech Melkamu in the 5,000m, as well as the reinvigorated year-lead Mestawet Tufa and younger sister Ejegayehou Dibaba, the reigning Olympics silver medalist, in the longer event.
The women’s schedule sees the 10,000m final on the opening day of athletics action on Aug. 15. Heats for the 5,000m are four days later with the final on Aug. 22.
FOOT SOLDIER: Running without shoes, Bikila, an Imperial Guardsman in Ethiopian Emperor Haile Selassie’s court, pulls ahead in the 1960 Rome marathon
[Popperfoto/Getty]
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By SIMON ROBINSON A few of the other runners sniggered when they saw Abebe Bikila turn up at the start of the Olympic marathon with no shoes. As a television camera scanned the scrum of athletes readying themselves for the starter’s gun, a commentator asked: “And what’s this Ethiopian called?” It was 1960, Rome. Africa was just shrugging off the weight of colonial rule and some sporting officials still doubted Africans were ready for the big time. A little over 2 hr. 15 min. later that myth lay shattered by the slight man wearing number 11, a member of Ethiopian Emperor Haile Selassie’s Imperial Guard and a proud African whose gliding, barefoot run through Rome’s cobblestone streets announced his continent’s emergence as a running powerhouse.
Bikila’s triumph was all the more stunning because it happened in the capital of Ethiopia’s former military occupier. Legend has it that he made his decisive move in the race just as he passed the Axum Obelisk, a towering stela that Mussolini had brought back from Ethiopia as war loot. Four years later in Tokyo, Bikila won gold again, the first man to defend his Olympic marathon title. This time he wore shoes.
For such a pivotal figure in sports history, not much is known about Bikila. Perhaps there is little to know. A poor villager who faithfully served the Emperor and was coached by a charismatic Swede named Onni Niskanen, Bikila left neither piles of letters nor much insight into his own dreams and beliefs. After his twin marathon wins, filled with hubris and alcohol, his body betrayed him. He failed in Mexico in ’68, was paralyzed in a car accident and died a few years later at the age of 41.
Two new books about the runner tackle in very different ways the paucity of behind-the-scenes substance and the absence of telling interviews with the man himself. In Barefoot Runner: The Life of Marathon Champion Abebe Bikila, former rock journalist Paul Rambali weaves a powerful narrative through a series of vignettes. The book, just out in paperback, makes liberal use of fictionalizing devices — interior monologues, imagined conversations — that render it less reliable as a historical account, but help to capture the drama of Bikila’s life. It’s hard to read Rambali’s well-paced description of the Rome race without a rush of excitement and joy.
Tim Judah’s Bikila: Ethiopia’s Barefoot Olympian is a more straightforward version of the same tale. Though Judah, a veteran foreign correspondent who knows Africa well, offers us plenty of solid reporting, his account struggles to overcome the dearth of rich source material even as it gets bogged down in some of the details the author has managed to dig up. At its best — in Judah’s description of the Rome race, and in providing context that explains the wider importance of Bikila’s victory — the book is a valuable addition to the history of running and Africa. But if you’re comfortable with a biographer cutting some corners and finessing some facts, then Rambali’s book is by far the more inspiring read.
HOUSTON — In honor of the 19th anniversary of Congressman George “Mickey” Leland’s final mission, Sen. Rodney Ellis and the widow of Leland hosted a reception at the Houston Museum of Natural Science and a private viewing of the exhibit, ‘Lucy’ Held in Honor of Congressman Leland.”
Congressman Leland and his staffers, state department officials, and Ethiopian nationals were en route to a refugee camp in Ethiopia in 1989 near the Sudanese border when contact with them was lost. Six days later, the plane was found with no survivors.
Congressman Leland started a congressional internship program, in which college students were integrated into every aspect of his legislative operations.
Ellis has continued that legacy with his own Texas Legislative Internship Program, which is coordinated through the Mickey Leland Center on World Hunger and Peace at Texas Southern University
The event not only recognized the program’s supporters but also a reunion of former Leland staffers, colleagues, and friends.
BEIJING (Reuters) – The spark is back for Ethiopian Olympic 5,000 meters champion Meseret Defar — and just in time.
After a surprise defeat in the African championships, the 24-year-old Olympic and world gold medalist has rallied to go into the Beijing Games as favorite.
There is even a possibility she might race for the gold against compatriot and rival Tirunesh Dibaba, who snatched Defar’s 5,000 meters world record in June.
“Those who thought I had disappeared should watch my performance in Stockholm,” Defar told the IAAF’s website ( www.iaaf.org ).
A lifetime best of 14:12.88 in the grand prix meeting left Defar agonizingly close to Dibaba’s world record of 14:11.15.
“When I finished the race and saw the time, I was so disappointed,” Defar said. “I was very depressed and cried at the moment. It is very painful to miss a world record by just one second.”
Only later did she realize the importance of the run.
“Thinking back, I am happy with improving my personal best and using the race to get ready for Beijing,” she said.
SURPRISE LOSS
The year had started well with a world indoor two-mile record in Boston and a third 3,000 meters title at the world indoor championships.
Then came her first 5,000 meters loss in almost two years when compatriot Meselech Melkamu outran Defar to win the African Championships in Addis Ababa in May.
“I was not feeling well in the week before the race and had not been training as well as I had hoped,” Defar said. “But the African Championships were very important for me because it is the first ever major championship on Ethiopian soil. I had to run in front of my people.”
Another bad race followed in Eugene, Oregon before the superb run in Stockholm.
“I am happy to go the Olympics in good form.” Defar said. “It is as difficult to win it for the second time,” she added.
“I want to win everything that is on offer and break every record there is to break.”
Women sell food at a roadside in Addis Ababa
Photo: Manoocher Deghati/IRIN
ADDIS ABABA (IRIN) – The number of people requiring emergency food aid is expected to increase as food security has not improved, according to the latest assessment of drought-affected areas, a senior government official said.
“In general, the findings of the assessment indicated that the overall food security situation in the drought-affected areas has not improved,” Abera Deresa, the minister of agriculture, told reporters in Addis Ababa on 7 August. The assessment was of the regular belg (short rains) season.
Abera said the food security situation had been exacerbated by the country’s dependence on rain-fed agriculture. “Failed rains in the south in October and November during the belg season led to crop failure,” he said.
Parts of Southern Nations, Nationalities, and People’s Region (SNNPR) are extremely food insecure after minimal rains meant a failed sweet potato harvest in February and a near failure of the current belg harvest, according to a food security outlook for July to December by the Famine Early Warning Systems Network (FEWS Net).
In southern and southeastern Ethiopia, including the southern zones of Somali Region, pastoral and agro-pastoral populations remain highly to extremely food-insecure due to successive seasons of below-average rains, flooding in riverine areas, livestock disease, an army worm infestation, conflict, inadequate humanitarian assistance, and extremely high prices of food, stated the FEWS Net report.
Successive poor rains in November and December and later in March and April had led to at least 4.6 million people requiring emergency relief, according to Abera.
The government had launched an appeal for 509,916MT of food and an additional US$38.6 million for non-food needs such as health, nutrition, water, sanitation and agriculture.
Abera said there was still a deficit of 278,000MT of food and $3 million to address the food and non-food requirements.
“We are trying to address the problem with the available resources but we still need donor support,” he said.
Widespread crop failure had led to critical food insecurity, prompting increased migration, according to the July findings of the Disaster Prevention and Preparedness Agency (DPPA)-led multi-agency mission.
Although food security is expected to improve in the eastern parts of Tigray, Amhara, and Oromiya region, as well as most of SNNPR from October to December, the average seasonal rains will be insufficient to improve food security for pastoralists in the south and southeast, said FEWS Net.
How many more people required emergency food support would be established after consultation with the regional governments, according to the DPPA Director-General, Simon Mechale.
“We do not have complete information from some of the regional governments yet,” Mechale said.
(Press TV) — Four Ethiopian Woyanne soldiers were killed in heavy clashes with the Union of Islamic Court (UIC) fighters north of the Somali capital Mogadishu.
A Press TV correspondent, reporting from Mogadishu, says the fighting between the Ethiopian Woyanne troops and the UIC fighters is ongoing in the Industrial Street.
According to an eye-witness at least six mortars landed in the Pasta Base in north Mogadishu killing 4 Ethiopian Woyanne soldiers and injuring several others.
In a telephone interview with Press TV the UIC spokesman, Abdirahim Isse Addow, confirmed that the UIC has launched two strong attacks on Somali government troops backed by Ethiopian Woyanne soldiers.
FOOT SOLDIER: Running without shoes, Bikila, an Imperial Guardsman in Ethiopian Emperor Haile Selassie’s court, pulls ahead in the 1960 Rome marathon 
