Haile Gebrselassie ran with a crooked arm shaped by years of school runs
As a farm boy in Ethiopia, Haile Gebrselassie ran ten kilometres to school each morning and ten back each evening, books tucked under one arm. Long after he became a champion, his left arm still bent as if clutching them. Those daily miles grew into 27 world records and a nickname: the Emperor.
He was one of ten children in Asella, and lost his mother to cancer when he was six. His breakthrough came in 1992 at the World Junior Championships in Seoul, where he won both the 5,000 and 10,000 metres. A year later he began a run of four straight world titles at 10,000 metres, the first of them memorable for the wrong reason: he clipped Moses Tanui's heel at the bell, the Kenyan lost a shoe, surged ahead in fury, and was still reeled in down the home straight.
Records then fell almost routinely. In 1995 in Zürich he cut nearly 11 seconds from the 5,000-metre mark, a run Track and Field News named performance of the year. Three years later in Helsinki his pacemakers faded early and commentators wrote him off, yet he needed a sub-four-minute final 1,600 metres and produced one, closing with a 56.77-second lap to set a new record of 12:39.36. In 1999 he even played himself in the film Endurance, about his quest for Olympic gold.
Two Olympic golds came at 10,000 metres. His defence of the title in Sydney in 2000 made him only the third man to retain it, after Emil Zátopek and Lasse Virén, and he beat Paul Tergat by just 0.09 seconds, a tighter margin than that year's 100-metre final. He ran the last 200 metres in 25.4 seconds.
Later he moved to the roads, winning the world half marathon title in 2001 and co-founding the Great Ethiopian Run. He won Berlin's marathon four years in a row from 2006, and in 2008 set a world record of 2:03:59 there, shaving 27 seconds from his own best; it lasted three years. Across his career he broke 61 Ethiopian national records, and he has also built a business career at home.
Source: Haile Gebrselassie
