Can Kenenisa Bekele be beaten in a 5000 meter run?
It doesn’t appear so. This evening at Weltklasse Zurich, the 5th of 6 meets in the Golden League track series, he outran his closest competitor (Edwin Cheruiyot Soi) by about 2½ seconds to win the race in 12:52.32. That’s almost 4 seconds faster than his world-leading time of 12:56.25 that he ran in Rome earlier this year.
His win means that he’s only 1 race away from splitting a $1 million jackpot for anybody that can dominate their event in the Golden League series. Kerron Stewart is out of the running after her 0.18 second loss to Carmelita Jeter (who won in 10.86 seconds), but Sanya Richards in the 400 (48.94 seconds) and Yelena Isinbayeva in the pole vault (5.06m) are both still dominating their events and could potentially split the jackpot.
Kenenisa has now won 16 straight 5000 meter races. His last loss was to Bernard Lagat by 0.82 seconds at the Norwich Union London Grand Prix on July 28, 2006. In the past week or so he won both the 5000m and 10000m races at the world championships.
His next 5000m race is scheduled for 1 week from tonight on September 4, 2009. He’ll be running in the final meet of the Golden League at the Van Damme Memorial in Brussels.
(More Info: Men’s Results – Women’s Results – Photo Credit: André Zehetbauer)
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