An Olympic farewell for Haile Gebrselassie

BEIJING (AP) All his life, Haile Gebrselassie has run this distance - 10,000 meters, or 6.2 miles, the toughest test there is on the Olympic track.

It was the distance he ran to school, there and back every day as a boy, from his farm on a high plateau in south-central Ethiopia.

It is the distance over which Gebrselassie stamped indelible memories on the Olympics, over which he established himself as one of the best runners the world has seen.

On Sunday night, at the Beijing Games, it proved a distance too far.

"My bullet is finished," the former two-time gold medalist told his Ethiopian friends after finishing sixth. Honorable. But not the dominant force he used to be.

Really, Gebrselassie shouldn't have run this race.

Twenty-five lung-burning, muscle-searing laps. No judges to decide the winner. No go-fast suits. Just men against each other and their own pain, tearing round the track in little more than a minute on each lap, with a fearsome sprint at the end.

It's not a race for a 35-year-old who has had surgery on both Achilles tendons, whose asthma can be set off by his wife's perfume.

"The 10,000," he admitted afterward, "maybe it's a little bit too much."

But what choice did he have?

Ethiopia wouldn't have understood if its favorite son had stayed home. So he ran, a bit for himself and a bit for his people. He makes them dream and forget their poverty for the 27-odd minutes of a race. So he ran - even though in Athens four years ago he had said he wouldn't and that, as far as the 10,000 was concerned, he was done.

"He got a lot of pressure," said his manager, Jos Hermens. "Seventy million people on his back."

Now is time to say farewell. Let this Olympic 10,000 be his last.

The crown that Gebrselassie bore so proudly - he was unbeatable over 10,000 from 1993 to 2001 - belongs to another Ethiopian now.

Kenenisa Bekele has the finishing kick Gebrselassie once had. He used it to devastating effect to win on Sunday night. Now, they both have two 10,000-meter golds. Gebrselassie's came in Atlanta in 1996 and four years later in Sydney. Bekele's came in Athens in 2004 and, now, in Beijing.

Like Gebrselassie, Bekele has big dreams.

"Running is my talent, my gift, my job," he said. "I want to continue to make history."

He's 26. He has the 5,000- and 10,000-meter world records that Gebrselassie once owned. He still has time ahead of him. Gebrselassie does, too. Just not at this distance.

Other challenges beckon. Gebrselassie's not done yet. He wants to become the first man to run the marathon in under 2 hours, 4 minutes - perhaps in Berlin next month.

Ideally, he would have run the marathon in Beijing. But he feared the pollution, the heat, humidity would do lasting damage to his slight frame. It was a risk he couldn't take.

"His mind is very much on Berlin," Hermens said.

Further down the road are the London Olympics in 2012. Gebrselassie would love to run the marathon there.

If he doesn't, then it was nice to say goodbye in Beijing, to reflect on the career of a runner who has given us so much.

As a boy, Gebrselassie had stolen his father's radio and run with it into the fields so he could listen to Miruts Yifter win Olympic gold for Ethiopia in the 10,000 at the 1980 Moscow Games.

"I knew what I was doing was wrong. My father hated thieves, and he would have been very angry with me," Gebrselassie told his biographer, Jim Denison. "But inside my heart, I knew that what I wanted to know and hear from the radio was not a bad thing."

That's how sporting dynasties live on. His speed is fading but Gebrselassie leaves a legacy in Ethiopia that continues - through all those boys who were probably listening on the radio to him and Bekele run together on Sunday night.