On the lavender track, the two long Spanish relays fail and the wonderful Letsile Tebogo takes off again. Just 14 hours after being proclaimed Olympic champion in the 200m (19.46s), she leads the Botswana exhibition with a first leg of 44.4s, coming out of the blocks, leaving everyone far behind, especially the United States, which, like a jokehands over the first baton to the 16-year-old boy Quincy Wilson, a media and viral phenomenon, who runs pitifully (47.30s), and forces the veteran Vernon Norwood to work hard (43.60s launched) as an athlete to avoid being eliminated and then as a foster father to the boy exposed to almost certain failure, hugging him and giving him wise advice to get over the ordeal. No trace of Noah Lyles, the 100m champion, who after announcing that he has covid gave up running more in Paris, neither the short nor the long relay.
And Moha Attaoui, a Spaniard, shines for the 800m final.
Moha Attaoui tells the story of the semi-final, a castaway who is deprived of a sip of water by a strict judge before leaving, and who is forced by a stubborn Belgian to stretch his neck as far as he can to survive. A strong and fast castaway, finally rescued by his own talent from the suffocating violet island of the Stade de France to become the second Spaniard in an Olympic 800m final on Saturday (19.05).
The water, the open bottle that he arrives taking small sips from the call room at 11.40, the sun is beating down, he steals it from the block that marks his lane, 5, before a strict judge comes out, and he has to chase her to get another one, since she refuses to give him the open bottle. “Fuck, I had to say to her, what does it matter if you give me the bottle?” he explains. “It pisses me off a bit. It messes up concentration a bit, but it’s not that bad.” The dry mouth, the little sip, the nerves. He doesn’t stop moving before the start, in his line. “I was very nervous. I don’t know why, but both in the series and in the semi, I think I’ve never been so nervous in my life. I’ve tried to do everything, but, nothing, there was no way to calm down.”
Then he runs, and sweats. He suffers.
“I ran badly, very badly, and I had good legs. I went very far back and then at the bell I was able to gain a few places on the inside, but I found myself a bit trapped,” says the athlete from Torrelavega, who at 23 years old succeeds Adrián Ben, the one who opened the door to the generation, finalist (and fifth) in the Tokyo Games. “Yes, I could have gone out and attacked with 300 meters to go, but I knew I shouldn’t do that. Today’s rivals were very tough. I might have changed and in the last 50 meters they would pass me. And well, in the last 100, I said, they are going to puncture, they are going to puncture and I am going to be able to sneak in on the inside or in the middle. And as I didn’t see a gap, I had to open myself up and stroke, stroke as much as possible and stick my head in to beat the Belgian Crestan in the position and get into the final.” He finished fourth, and despite having run badly, as he says, with a magnificent time (1m 43.69s) that qualifies him. “In the morning, even though I have run a 1.43, I still find it difficult to run well. I wake up at seven in the morning, I go out for a run for five minutes, ten, to try to wake up a bit, but that is still difficult for me. And in the afternoons these days I found myself with an energy that said, damn, I wish I was this vital in the morning… I think I am going to approach the race anyway, running from behind. And that’s it. I think that is when I do it best, that’s it.”
There you will meet the crème de la crème of a race that is experiencing an apotheosis of good times, to which he has contributed. With him, ninth best of all time less than a month ago with his 1m 42.04s, will be the 3rd (the atomic Algerian Djamel Sedjati, out of this world, 1m 41.46s), the 4th (the Kenyan Emmanuel Wanyonyi, 1m 41.58s) and the 5th (the French Gabriel Tual, 1m 41.63s), and two others who like him have gone under 1m 43s, the American Bryce Hoppel, world indoor champion, and the Canadian Marco Arop, a closet, world champion in Budapest. And the two who remain are fearsome, the 22-year-old Englishman of great class whose progress has been slowed by injuries, and the Botswanan with an electric finish Tshepiso Masalela.
“The final is going to be brutal. You have already seen the level of the 8th. It is incredible,” said Attaoui after finishing fourth. “The time is secondary. Yes, it is enough to say, I am 1.42, 1.43, but then you have to run the same as everyone else and be there. I don’t think anyone in Great Britain would give a penny for Burgin to get through and Pattison, who is 1.42, to be left out, and that is what happened. The time you come with is of no use.”
An Olympic final is the last stage of a transformative journey that Attaoui began in January. The athlete from Torrelavega, who started in the 1,500m and will finish there, revealed himself to the world by planting bombs, his nuclear change that few 800m athletes possess, dry, at the World Championships in Budapest, where although he did not reach the final, he achieved his best time at that time (1m 44.35s) in the semi-final. The performance dazzled those responsible for On, the shoe he wears, who offered him a real professional contract. He had to abandon his training in Torrelavega with Raúl Gutiérrez, and enroll in long altitude camps in South Africa and Saint-Moritz for most of the year. Learn English and wait for the chemistry to spark with his new coach, a young man from Leipzig called Thomas Dreissigacker. A model progression that has not yet culminated. The Olympic final is one more step.
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