CIRCUMSTANCES did their best to prevent Kenenisa Bekele from writing another page in athletics history yesterday, but the heir apparent to Haile Gebrselassie is not easily deterred. Having become, last year, the first man to win short and long-course titles at a single World Cross Country Championships, Bekele is now the first to retain both.

Illness and other inconveniences had threatened to undermine Bekele’s chances in Lausanne but his runaway victory in the long-course event, over 12 kilometres yesterday, completed his double after he had won the short-course race, over four kilometres, on Saturday.

Last year Gebreselassie said that Bekele, his fellow Ethiopian, had the potential to break his track world records but an Achilles tendon injury last summer held him back. There is no doubt, though, that, at 20, Bekele’s claim to greatness is more advanced than Gebrselassie’s was at the same age.

Gebrselassie never won a cross-country world title but already Bekele has five, having won the junior gold medal in 2001. However, his double defence over the weekend had been put in jeopardy by food poisoning some weeks ago. Then, having arrived in Lausanne, Bekele was not in bed until after midnight on the day of his first race. He had joined an official IAAF function on Lake Geneva, not realising that it involved a four-hour cruise.

Then, after Saturday’s win, he was detained for two hours in drug-testing. Even with him, though, Ethiopia could not stop Kenya from winning the team title for the eighteenth successive year.

Worknesh Kidane, from Ethiopia, took advantage of Paula Radcliffe’s absence to win the senior women’s long-course race.