Moha Attaoui, a 22-year-old athlete from Torrelavega, is told every day by his coach, Thomas Dreissigacker: “Come on Moha, this summer you are going to beat them all. Who do you think is your greatest rival? Because I don’t see any. I see you as the best, I don’t know…” “I hear that from Thomas, and it motivates me even more. I go out to run laps around the lake in the mountains, happy with all the decisions I have made,” says Attaoui, Spanish champion and European runner-up in Rome, who on Friday night, in the Luis II stadium in Monaco, showed that the coach who shares his confidences with him in the solitude of Sankt Moritz during the long spring is not exaggerating very much. Attaoui did not win the race, finishing second behind the exaggerated Algerian Djamel Sedajati (1m 41.46s, the best world time of the year, third in history), but his time, 1m 42.02s, left the Spanish record for 800 metres at the level that Spanish middle-distance runners deserve, who are experiencing their golden age. Attaoui’s time, who beat some of the biggest names of the moment in the race, such as the Canadian Marco Arop, world champion, or the French Gabriel Tual, reduced, and reduces by more than a second and a half, the 1m 43.65s with which Saúl Ordóñez, on the same track in Monaco, set the national record at 1m 43.65s six years ago.
Spanish athletics is thus joining the unique excitement that the world 800m is experiencing after last Sunday three athletes (Sedjati, 1m 41.56s; the Kenyan Wanyonyi, 1m 41.58s, and Tual, 1m 41.61s, third, fourth and fifth best world times in history) went under 1m 42s, and three more, under 1m 43s, in the same race on the Charléty track, the mother of all 800m. “When that happened, there was no one who did not say that those times left the Spanish 800m far behind the best. It was a way of saying that no one had any idea of what athletics is like, or what the 800m is like or what the Spanish middle-distance runners of today are like, a spectacular generation,” explains Jorge González Amo, an athletics expert. “Things are as they are. “If Moha or Adrian Ben had been in the Paris race, they would have also made extraordinary times, because they are better and have always been at the level of Tual and have always beaten Crestan who did 1m 42s. If they make these times it is because there is a generation that can pass the 400m in 49s and still be strong. All they needed was to be in a race of that level to put things in their place. If Ben had been in Monaco, he would also have done 1m 42s.”
For a moment, before the times were displayed on the scoreboard, it looked as if Attaoui had even dipped below 1m 42s. Attaoui, who has such a high average speed, is going so well that it seems like he has no trouble at all, and he ran an exceptional race despite starting out, at 1.60m tall, sharing the lane with Swedish giant Andreas Kramer. He came in at the back of the pack in the 400m (50.7s), tenth, more than a second behind the pacemaker (49.20s), but in the 600m (1m 16.10, after a 100m of 12.4s) he was already fifth. He stayed in the curve and enjoyed it on the final straight, zigzagging between giants and beating everyone except Sedjati with a final 100m in 13.1s, when the liquid bicarbonate ingested an hour and a half earlier could no longer buffer the rise of lactic acid that began to paralyze him.
After making a name for himself at the Budapest World Championships, Attaoui, who had been training in Torrelavega with Raúl Gutiérrez with hardly any help (he financed his altitude training with his savings and help from friends), received a great offer from the OAC team, organised by the Swiss brand On, to become a fully professional. He spent long periods living the life of a monk at altitude in Sankt Moritz, and will arrive at the Paris Games with one of the best times of the participants (the fourth in the world championships this year), which does not even guarantee him a place in the final, the 800m world championships are so dense, the heats and semi-finals of the event at World Championships and Games are so tough.
At the same Diamond League meeting, Marta García, already the national record holder for 5,000m and Attaoui’s training partner in Sankt Moritz with Thomas Dreissigacker, broke the Spanish record for 2,000m (5m 32.86s) in a race in which the Australian Jessica Hull broke the world record (5m 19.70s). There were Spanish pacemakers, Lorena Martín, and Esther Guerrero, the previous holder of the national record (5m 45.30s). In addition, the Norwegian Jakob Ingebrigtsen went below 2m 27s for the first time to clearly beat Cheruiyot and Nuguse and leave the European record at 3m 26.73s, the fourth best world record in history, just 73 hundredths of a second away from the untouchable world record of Hicham el Guerruj.
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