The Electronic Telegraph Tuesday 18 May 2004 Gareth A Davies
For the last decade, Haile Gebrselassie has embodied the innate runner in the African soul, like heat shimmering across baked earth. Seventeen new world record marks have influenced a generation across that arid continent. Gebrselassie is simply world class. If you had to vote for Earth's representative in an Interplanetary Games, he would be straight on the team sheet. In Athens, at the Olympic Games, the Ethiopian athlete will make his assault on a third consecutive 10,000 metres gold medal. Yet he is under pressure, not just from compatriot Kenenisa Bekele, 21, the young pretender to his Olympic crown, and a crop of Kenyans, but from his calling outside sport, which is rapidly gathering momentum. This is a man with a social conscience. One which seriously gnaws at him. He is arguably one of the greatest athletes of all time and, like Muhammad Ali and Ayrton Senna, his impact on society and individuals transcends sport. He knows he has the influence to develop a ravaged country for the better. Gebrselassie's fundraising and charity work already reach out to diverse areas: he is a United Nations ambassador working against the spread of AIDS; he is driven to making education a central pillar of Ethiopian life and through him three private schools have been built; he raises money for the Sports Association for the Disabled of Ethiopia. The list goes on and on. There are calls for him to go into politics. His popularity is so widespread in his homeland that the word 'president' rings in his ears. A manifesto, without him planning one, has developed alongside the drumbeat of his victorious track career. For the International Association of Athletics Federations, Gebrselassie is a public relations godsend. At the behest of the IAAF, several journalists from European media groups were invited to his home in Addis Ababa last week, your correspondent among them. Three weeks ago he moved into a palace fit for royalty, built on a hillside suburb of Addis Ababa. His trophies are still packed in 30 or so cardboard boxes in the main hallway. A stone bust of Gebrselassie sits in the porch waiting for a home. The house is of grand design. The colonnades are modelled on the Acropolis, the sweeping stucco-fronted steps on a London mansion house; the mosaic and terracotta tiles were imported from Italian designer houses and painstakingly etched into a temple of multiculturalism. The marble floors on the huge open-plan ground floor are native Ethiopian. Ten years of travel, trophies and triumphs rolled into a three-storey mansion designed not purely for his family to enjoy; he clearly intends to entertain those with influence to effect change. Gebrselassie is a wonderful host. Gregarious, generous, humble. At lunch he waited on us, pouring wine, a livewire around the table. The party arrived late and he had already eaten. On the menu was injera, a traditional pancake-like bread. On a wall, above the lunch table, was a painting of the Last Supper. He is a Coptic Christian. His role as goodwill ambassador with the United Nations Development Programme, fighting poverty and the spread of AIDS, he sees as a job. With good reason. Sixty per cent of deaths in the 25-50 age group in Addis Ababa are through contracting HIV. More than a million children have been orphaned because of the virus. "Everyone knows someone who has died from AIDS," Gebrselassie said. "These are the people who are my supporters wherever I go. I have been close to people who have died from AIDS. I can't change everything by myself but I can be one of the people who are trying to change the situation." After lunch we sampled Ethiopian coffee, the country's largest export, and tege, a mildly alcoholic brew made from honey and barley. His wife, Alem, and their three daughters, aged two, four and six, joined us. The girls run around the house, shaking hands with the visitors. Gebrselassie glows with pride. He lost his own mother when he was seven. By then she had already instilled the value of schooling on her nine children. The three schools he has built are named after her. The man who has become an Ethiopian icon grew up in the countryside, more than 100 miles from Addis, in the village of Assela. The family of 11 lived in a tucal, a one-room, straw-covered dwelling, its walls framed with wood and sealed with mud. There were no amenities. The nearest water was a river almost two miles away. It was a six-mile run to school every morning, through scrub, forest and across a river, which had no bridge. They had no shoes. Gebrselassie's father farmed five hectares of land, ploughed with horses to grow rice and maize. "Schooling is so important," Gebrselassie said. "At the moment I'm trying to combine sport and business. I find the business world hard. I'm trying to concentrate on schools, really, in the countryside. I feel a social responsibility. We need to open people's eyes. There is a lack of education in Ethiopia. I love this country, and if I become a minister one day I want to pay the people back." He recalled his first international competition, the World Cross-Country Championships in Antwerp in 1991. "It was the first time I had flown out of Ethiopia. I tried to open a window." The Olympic Games have been his proving ground. He hinted that he would start running marathons after Athens. "Sydney was my greatest moment as an athlete," he said. "I was so nervous. I still think about that race, and to have two gold medals is wonderful." Gold in Athens will be the toughest yet, with Bekele having outsprinted him in the 10,000m final at the World Athletics Championships in Paris last year. On the day of the lunch with Gebrselassie, Bekele was at the National Stadium in Addis Ababa, watching an inter-club athletics meeting. There is a mural of Gebrselassie on a high-rise building overlooking the stadium. In Amharic, the official language of Ethiopia, are inscribed the words: 'You Can'. Most of the athletes run barefoot. There is no starter's gun but the atmosphere is riveting. "Haile is my hero," Bekele said. Neither man would be drawn to comment on racing each other in Athens. Not one Ethiopian would begrudge Gebrselassie his new palace. He is already the people's president. Athens may be fast approaching, but for the teak-tough African icon the most difficult challenge ahead lies in harnessing his great fame to help eradicate the suffering of his people. Eamonn Condon [EMAIL PROTECTED]
