Is Kenenisa Bekele a Freak(In a good way) or what? (Read 945 times)

Is Kenenisa Bekele a Freak(In a good way) or what? That is unreal to think that he ran a decent final 800 to CLOSE the 5000! Has Bekele ever done the short stuff? If you can consider the 800 short? If I ever tried to run one 53 second 400m it would probably KILL ME! It looked like he could run those all day! If you put Bekele’s endurance in Bolt’s Body you would have the true definition of a “FREAK”!

He is simply the best distance runner in the planet. His 5k Olympics victory was simply beautiful. He probably led 8+ laps and be the pacer for the 3 Kenyans and Lagat. And he finished with a 53 sec last lap. Just unbelievable. In another forum, back in Jul, some people kind of argued with me that Lagat would beat Bekele in Olympics since it would be slow. I was saying if Bekele ran, it wouldn't be slow. And that Bekele's last lap could be faster than Lagat at his best in 5k. I was joking that Bekele could lose his shoes, stop and wear his shoes and still pass everybody and win like what he did in the world XC. I think if Bekele runs the 1500m, he could be in the top 5 in the Olympics. Not sure if he would win it though.

How much money are we talking about? $10K per race? $25K, $50K? If you only run 1-4 races a year that is not exactly killing it considering the time in training you have to do to win a race of that caliber. I would think that a sponsors money far exceeds the prize money unless you are one of the lucky few who can break world records every time you go out there!

Outside of here (I mean USA), T&F is much bigger. Nowadays, a lot of athletes don't make most of their money on their salaries or prices, but on advertisements and sponsorships. For example, 04 Olympics 110m hurdle gold medalist Liu is the only Chinese male T&F winner ever, and probably the only gold medalists for Asians in sprinting events. He makes US$20 mil a year, second only to his fellow countryman Yao who also makes lots of money on advertisements. It is more difficult here in US because a lot of athletes win T&F medals. When something is scarce, its value is higher. Another example, when Paula Radcliffe didn't finish the 04 Marathon, she was the headline for every TV station and newspaper in Britain and she had to escape the country for several months. In Beijing, when Deena and Magdalena didn't finish, they were probably mentioned less than 5 sec on TV and didn't take more than a couple of sentence on US newspaper. T&F is pretty big in other countries. Bekele married a big women star in Ethiopia and it was compared to Beckham and Victoria. For those who doesn't know who Beckham is, think about Kobe Bryant's popularity but bigger and more global. These track stars make a lot of money, not from prize money.