IT COMES as some surprise to find Hicham El Guerrouj wrapped up warm in winter hat, running tights and gloves as we arrive to watch him train at the no-frills stadium 1,600 metres up in the Atlas Mountains of Morocco. It is late March and the North African heat should be warming our backs. He takes three steps forward to shake my hand. “It’s like in London, eh?” he says smiling, referring to the weather. “Two degrees,” Abdelkader Kada, his coach, informs us. It feels colder.
By the end of the session, 20 repetition runs of 300 metres at sub-four-minute mile pace, the drizzle has turned to sleet and near-darkness has arrived prematurely. Reports of El Guerrouj training in his homeland usually refer to cloudless skies, red-tinged peaks and an arid plateau with colourful flowers on the plains below. But, as the low clouds move in and the wind whips up, the Linford Christie Stadium, next to Wormwood Scrubs, on a dank December afternoon seems no less inviting.
At least El Guerrouj’s loyal friend, Houcine Benzriginet, is taking the worst of the weather for him. Benzriginet has been El Guerrouj’s devoted training pacemaker since 1997, yet he never races. Lap after lap without ever experiencing championship nerves or hearing the bell.
“He is part of my success, he does his job like a robot,” El Guerrouj says of the man whose devotion has been marked by the gift of a flat in Rabat.
After a devastating experience at the last Olympics, in Sydney, the world’s greatest middle-distance runner wanted to quit but Benzriginet persuaded him to carry on. “He is even better than a psychologist because he understands me,” El Guerrouj said. “After the Olympics, Houcine played a very important role in getting me back on the rails, waking me up in the morning and taking me to training, but it took four months to recover my enthusiasm.”
There is no question of them cutting the session short. “I have trained in worse than this,” El Guerrouj said. “Once, during Ramadan, I trained at 11 o’clock at night when it was minus 6.”
The next morning paints a wholly different picture. The sun is out and El Guerrouj is running 14 kilometres through the cedar forest where, Kada tells us, wild boar and monkeys roam. A vigorous weights workout follows in the afternoon. Every session counts. There are less than five months to go before El Guerrouj, the mile and 1,500 metres world record-holder and four- times world champion, has to make sure that he will not be remembered as the greatest athlete never to win an Olympic title.
For that dubious honour, El Guerrouj is probably, at least for now, ahead of Merlene Ottey, Ron Clarke and Colin Jackson. As Britain prepares to celebrate next month the 50th anniversary of its most cherished moment in athletics, Sir Roger Bannister’s first sub-four-minute mile, El Guerrouj knows that his place in history depends on what happens in the Athens Olympic Stadium on the night of August 24, in the men’s 1,500 metres final.
In the past eight years, El Guerrouj has lost only three races out of 84 at 1,500 metres or the mile, but two have been Olympic finals. In 1996, at the Atlanta Games, he tripped and fell and, in 2000, he was beaten into second place by Noah Ngeny, from Kenya. Over dinner here two nights ago, El Guerrouj revealed that he will probably continue to the 2008 Beijing Olympics but admitted that Athens is his last chance of a gold medal.
“Next year I will concentrate on the 5,000 metres and I think I will be able to run the 10,000 metres in Beijing,” El Guerrouj said. However, he is 29 and, mindful of his age, he added: “I cannot say that I will win the 10,000 metres. There will be younger runners. That is why my objective is to win two titles in Athens.”
He plans to double at 1,500 and 5,000 metres, attempting to become the first athlete to win both at one Olympics since Paavo Nurmi, the Finn, in 1924.
Back at his apartment here, where he bases himself on his four or five three-week visits a year for altitude training, El Guerrouj watches a tape of Nurmi’s double and remarks how close the 5,000 metres was.
It was by a similarly close margin that El Guerrouj was denied the double at the World Championships in Paris last summer, when, having won the 1,500 metres, he was outdipped by Eliud Kipchoge, a junior from Kenya.
Clearly, though, El Guerrouj is less concerned with the double than having a fallback should the Olympic 1,500 metres treat him unkindly a third time. Last year, for Paris, he worked towards both. “This year,” Kada said, “Hicham will double but training is concentrated on the 1,500 metres. We will not do much specific work for the 5,000 metres and he will not race over 5,000 metres before the Olympics.” The 1,500 metres is his job, the 5,000 metres his toy. “In the 5,000, I feel like a teenager who has just learnt to drive,” he said.
Another unbeaten season at the metric mile last summer was enough to see El Guerrouj to a third successive IAAF male world athlete of the year award. But, even as he received his trophy in Monte Carlo in September, his mind was elsewhere. He was to marry, 13 days later, a woman he had met only six months earlier. “I hardly knew her,” he said. “I just saw her in the street one day and I liked her, so I took my parents to ask for her hand. I had never spoken to her, and at first she refused, but she said ‘yes’ a week later.”
Now Najoua Lahbil, the granddaughter of a former Moroccan prime minister, is Mrs El Guerrouj. If only winning Olympic titles was that easy. Although she is ten years his junior, at 19, and a university business student, they have begun their marriage in the firm understanding that she completes her degree and he puts athletics first.
“She has to follow her studies and I have to follow my career,” El Guerrouj said. “She never asks how much money I earn. She lives like a student, not like her husband is Hicham El Guerrouj.”
Which means that she has her own room at the university here and she is often left behind when her husband returns to train at the sea-level national athletics centre at Rabat.
Once the upset was over, El Guerrouj developed a philosophical view of his two Olympic failures. “What happened in Atlanta was just an accident and, before Sydney, I overtrained,” he said. “I find solace in destiny when something like that happens.”
But destiny, he hopes, will be kinder to him this summer. “Winning an Olympic gold medal is the only way to dry my tears from Atlanta and Sydney,” he said.
It is what drives him through sun and sleet in the Atlas Mountains.
