By Luke Phillips | Middle East Online
AMMAN, Jordan — Gulf states Bahrain and Qatar, each boasting a raft of African-born runners, will attempt to break the stranglehold Ethiopia and Kenya enjoy in the IAAF World Cross Country Championships here on Saturday.
The absence of reigning champions and multiple title-winning Ethiopian duo, Kenenisa Bekele and Tirunesh Dibaba, means that a host of other runners will have a chance to snatch victory in the two senior races.
More than 500 athletes from 70 countries will compete in the championships which comprise a men’s and female’s long course race over 12km and 8km respectively, for a total purse of 280,000 dollars, with 30,000 dollars going to the winner. There are also junior events for both sexes.
The only previous individual senior champions who will be racing for further honours in the Jordanian capital, hosting a major international athletics event for the first time, are Eritrean Zersenay Tadese and Ethiopian Gelete Burka.
Tadese, the bronze medallist at the worlds in Edinburgh last year, famously beat a heat-stroked Bekele in Mombasa in 2007, while Burka was the last champion of the now discontinued senior women’s short course race in 2006.
The Eritrean will face stiff competition from a raft of able rivals, not least Qatar’s world 3000m steeplechase champion in 2003 and 2005, Saif Saaeed Shaheen, and compatriot Ahmed Hassan Abdullah, Asian 10,000m record holder and cross-country champion.
Shaheen, who has spent most of the last two seasons out of competitive action due to injury, has finished in the top 10 at the World Cross Country Championships on four occasions, including a fourth place finish in 2005.
Aside from Abdullah, Qatar have also entered the reigning world marathon silver medallist Mubarak Hassan Shami for what has been described as a testing course over Amman’s hilly nine-hole Bisharat Golf Course.
Shami, who like Shaheen and Abdullah was once a Kenyan, has competed in each of the last three editions of the World Cross Country Championships and will be part of a Qatari effort to break African dominance over the event.
The Kenyan bid to nail a first individual long-course title since Paul Tergat in 1999 will be launched by 2009 Kenyan champion Moses Mosop, who won silver in Mombasa behind Tadese, and Leonard Komon, the runner-up in Edinburgh 12 months ago.
“I feel in top form,” said Mosop, nicknamed the ‘big engine’ for his heavy breathing while running.
“I’m relishing the challenge in Jordan. The weather and humidity in Amman is just like it was in Mombasa. I missed the gold medal two years ago and this is my time.”
There is a similar story in the women’s race, with Bahrain naming Asian cross-country champion and world 1500m title holder Maryam Yusuf Jamal for the first time since 2006.
The Ethiopian-born runner, who finished fifth in the Beijing Olympic 1500m final, comes to Amman on the back of a five-race winning streak that includes her fourth World Athletics Final 1500m victory in Stuttgart last September and a solo victory in her only indoor appearance in 2009 in Birmingham over the 1500m.
She will be joined in Amman by former Ethiopian Mimi Belete, who finished second behind Jamal in the senior Asian women’s 8km race.
Competition will come from Burka, the Netherlands’ Kenyan-born European champion Hilda Kibet and former world junior cross-country champions Meselech Melkamu of Ethiopia (2004) and Kenya’s Linet Masai (2007), who was the senior bronze medallist last year.
Schedule (all times GMT)
1130 – Women’s Junior Race, 6km; 1200 – Men’s Junior Race, 8km; 1240 – Women’s Senior Race, 8km; 1330 – Men’s Senior Race, 12km.
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