Passing The Baton

I recently read a post by The Thinking Runner about the retirement of Hicham El-Guerrouj. He was a great runner, perhaps the greatest, but he wasn't mine.

I came up in the waning days of Jim Ryun, when Marty Liquori was the American miler, and Steve Ovett and Sebastian Coe were the other guys who mattered. I recently found out that Liquori may have been a better distance runner than miler, but stayed mostly with the mile because it was the glamour event. These were my milers (and the mile was still competed regularly in my day, the transition to metric not having filtered down to the high school level in most places).

I don't know if it's a function of my age, or that I never felt much tie to El G, having rarely seen him race, but while I respect his racing, he just didn't excite me. Part of me thinks that it was a function of a perceived mercenary quality to his racing. Yet another part may have been that when young, I would regularly watch Ryun, Liquori, Ovett and Coe on weekend afternoons. That contact personalized the characters. El G never became a real person to me.

But, in the long end of middle distance, the baton is being passed. El G has surrendered the crown. If we're lucky, there will be a battle for the crown before the coronation of a new king. After all, isn't that struggle to best the racers around you what our sport is about?