It is the mother of all 1,500m, the best cast ever assembled, and Mo Katir and Mario García Romo, two aspiring Spaniards, and Jakob Ingebrigtsen at the helm, a 22-year-old Norwegian who everyone expects to break the record for the world of 1,500m (25 years ago the 3m 26s of Hicham el Guerruj in Rome). He doesn’t run at world record pace. Ingebrigtsen says that the track is not fast enough to go below 3m 26s and is content to go below 3m 28s and beat his best time and the European record. The hares, two, at that time guide him and in the last stretch the last one that overwhelmed him, Katir, undoes and wins only by distancing. He achieves his goal, 3m 27.95s, the best mark ever for the Tokyo Olympic champion, European record and sixth best mark of all time, and behind him, all those who sprint after Katir to be third also end up happy.
Katir, second, with 3m 28.89s, not so much, since he has not improved his best mark by 13 hundredths. Garcia Romo, yes. The Salamanca rider from Villar de Gallimazo, fifth, manages to drop below 3m 30s, the barrier of super excellence. His 3m 29.18s make him the third Spaniard after Katir, national record holder, and Fermín Cacho (3m 28.95s, who achieves it. Never seen before: two Spaniards, and very young, below 3m 30s in the same The friends of García Romo and training partners in the On team, Yared Nuguse and Ollie Hoare, break the record respectively for the United States (3m 29.02s) and Australia (3m 29.41s) and the Frenchman who arrives, Azzedine Habz remains, with 3m 29.26s, 28 hundredths off Mehdi Baala’s national record.
García Romo arrived in Oslo by plane at 1:30 in the morning on Wednesday. He comes from Sankt Moritz, in the Swiss highlands, where he has spent two weeks training with his group, Hoare and Nuguse, under the command of Dathan Ritzenheim, and has also gone down to Italy. “The practices have been very good”, he says before the race. “Looking ahead to the summer I think we are on the right path and for the 1500 on Thursday the objective is basically to fight for victory, to try to be as competitive as possible against everyone and, well, above all to try to make this a race that cement the steps well for the following summer races”.
Everything happens in Oslo, in the Bislett stadium, small and cute, in June, the sun does not set, the light is warm, reddish, like the facades of the surrounding houses, and on the balconies the neighbors drink white wine and savor athletics, they chant Karsten Warholm, the boy from the neighborhood, who trains there to burn the fences, win Olympic gold and break the world record, but they only expect one thing every year, the race that closes the rally, with the sun still shining at 10 pm, which is the men’s 1,500 this year and other years it’s the same but with 100 meters more, the mile. Oslo, its Bislett Games, is the memory of Ovett, Coe and Cram, the British who always shied away from confronting each other and regularly broke world records there, and it is the memory of Herb Elliott, a wild 20-year-old boy who the crazy summer of 1958 came to Scandinavia in a Volkswagen van from Dublin, where he had broken the world record for the mile, with half a dozen other Australians, drifters, long hair and beards, pulling the sack under the stars across half of Europe, and in Gothenburg, after nights of alcohol and excesses he broke the world record of the 1,500m (3m 36.0s) by more than two seconds and a few days later, in Oslo, the last day of his European summer, and already exhausted, he won with 3m 37.4s , and he only receives lukewarm applause that leaves him cold and who two years later would break the world record by winning the Rome Games says: “I have made the second best record in history, but the public’s insatiable appetite for more and more records than the mark disappointed almost everyone. I flew home considerably more cynical than when I went to Europe.”
Scandinavia, and Oslo, is the paradise of the middle distance and there is no athlete who does not feel a kind of euphoria when he goes out to compete, and Ingebrigtsen, six days after breaking the world record for the two miles (3,218.72m: 7m 54, 10s) is not Elliott and he does not complain about the lack of motivation of the public that drives him crazy with his command and his strides, his imperceptible but real acceleration that gives him victories by giving up rivals, although Katir, who has run in jerks and sometimes down Calle 2, he does not give up, and it is perhaps the fear that Mula’s Spaniard will defeat him at home that leads Ingebrigtsen to run more cautiously at the end, to get dizzy between the shouting and the cheers of thousands of spectators, to guard himself. something just in case, and perhaps he will give up a very complicated record in exchange for a victory, since he does not reach his limit, and he also gives up the feeling that more than 60 years later Elliott does not forget, that he is living breaking the record: “I put a scorcher [un cambio de ritmo imposible]I look down and see the runway hurtling backwards, and in the background, I see that darling slender lovely ribbon [el que ganaba cortaba la cinta que detenía el cronómetro con el pecho o la cara, y a veces la victoria dolía y sabía a sangre, cortes y heridas]and mesmerized, mesmerized I bounce towards it, feeling euphoric as it explodes in my chest.
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