Since April, Tariku Novales has spent more time at altitude than at home, more weeks in Addis Ababa, where he trained with the Ethiopian marathon team, than in Spain. Two weeks ago he came down from the clouds to the hot hell of Madrid and on Tuesday he slept well in the cardboard bed in the Olympic Village in Paris, the first Olympic experience for the national record holder of the 42.195 kilometres (2h 5m 48s) who on Saturday, at 8.00, will enter hell.
“I think it would be difficult to win in 2h 10m. If they want to run a tough race from the start, they might get there in that time, but if they want to run a fairly tactical race, they could easily do it in 2h 12m, 2h 13m,” says the 26-year-old Galician marathon runner, on the eve of his fifth marathon. He talks about the best in the world, his friend Tamirat Tola, his favourite, Kenenisa Bekele, Eliud Kipchoge, the best athletes in history, those who have made it seem impossible to run a marathon in more than 2h 3m over the last eight years. And he predicts 10 minutes more in Paris. The reason? A positive gradient of almost 350 metres. Roller coasters. “I had the opportunity to see the circuit, and the truth is that I had never seen such steep slopes. There will no longer be talk of the symbolic wall at 32, when a marathon becomes really hard, but of a real, physical wall, at almost 13% we have it at 28… The wall is going to be very long, because I don’t think it will be one or two kilometers, it will be many kilometers, I think that at the end, after 28, at 29 and a half, 30, there is the same, but downhill, so the muscle destruction is going to be massive, and from 31 to 38, 39, 40, all that mileage is going to be very complicated, because at the end you enter Paris again and you have the sensation that it is already flat, and in reality it is a false flat, there are many sections where there is a slight upward slope, or areas where you pass near bridges that due to construction there is always an up and down. If your legs are muscularly affected, you will suffer, and the pace that you intend to carry may be greatly reduced.
The wall, which has a 16% gradient and is also feared by Paris cyclists who set out on Sundays for Versailles and back, like the marathon, is called Pavé des Gardes, on the D181. Coaches say it is best not to look at it, because its verticality is frightening, the sight of a skier at the base of a slalom, but first, at the 20th, so that they can see Versailles in all its splendour, the climb to the hill of the Pershing monument, what a sight. An 8% climb means a 27% reduction in pace. They start from the town hall of Tarifa’s Anne Hidalgo, and finish at Invalides, an irony that may not be appreciated by those who arrive attacked by cramps, sore feet and muscle fibres on the verge of breaking.
“The preparation has not been as perfect as we had hoped. We have reduced the kilometre load a lot in order to be able to arrive healthy. I had a very bad ankle sprain two months ago and the recovery was complicated,” Novales laments, the worst of his six weeks in Ethiopia during which he discovered the secrecy surrounding the preparation of Kenenisa Bekele, the old lion who managed to qualify for the Games, the only one privileged with the right to train on his own, and not in the group in which Tola was also in the world record holder, Tigist Assefa. “I was extremely lucky to be allowed to share those moments, those training sessions, and also to suffer them, because, in the end, they are people who go at a much higher level than me. With them I improve and I have had the opportunity to continue proving why they are the best athletes in the world.”
With them, on the high plateau of the Rift Valley, Novales revived his roots – he was born in Jijiga, 600 kilometres east of the capital and was adopted as a child by a Galician couple – and lived with his limitations. “There are usually a lot of gradients on long runs, and one of the things I suffer most at altitude is the hills. If you already have trouble getting air in, well, on a slight incline it’s more, and if we add longer and steeper hills, it’s too noticeable,” he says. “But that was very good for me to work on my muscles on the descents. It’s what I’ve trained the most, more by accident than by looking for it. In the end, on the climbs I usually drop out of the group, whatever the group, because I generally train with group B, because group A can’t keep up with the pace. And, well, one of the things I learned to do is that, to fight hard on the climb, where I go with the hook, and to launch myself well on the descent to be able to rejoin the group and have the opportunity to finish with them. Well, they are usually progressive runs of 30 or 35 kilometers. In the last parts of the training they may be climbing a 9% slope at a pace of 1.10 or 3.15 per kilometer… For me it is totally unthinkable, not only because of my lack of adaptation to the altitude, but also because of my lack of level, training capacity, capacity to assimilate that type of load and that type of intensities.”
Yago Rojo, trained, like Novales, by Juan del Campo and Luismi Berlanas, and Ibrahim Chakir, who trains in Soria with Enrique Pascual, complete the Spanish team, and will witness one of the most intense moments of the Games, which could be the last tango of Eliud Kipchoge and Kenenisa Bekele, two of the gods who inhabit the Olympus in the background.
They will dance in Paris, where, 21 years ago, they fought for the first time. It was on the then ochre track of the Stade de France. The final of the 5,000m at the 2003 World Championships. Bekele, untouchable, had just won the 10,000m. His pre-designed rival was Hicham el Guerruj, champion of the 1,500m. But between them, an insolent 17-year-old Kenyan infiltrated and defeated them both. It was Kipchoge, who, over time, would move on to the marathon, bring the world record closer to two hours (2h 1m 9s) and win two Olympic golds (2016 and 2020), as only Abebe Bikila (1960 and 1964) and Waldemar Cierpinski (1976 and 1980) had done before. He lost the record crown last October when his compatriot Kelvin Kiptum beat him in 2h 35s. Kiptum, who died in an accident in February, will not be there alongside Seine on the slopes to snatch a third consecutive title, and perhaps Bekele, now 42, will not be there either, but they will not stop fighting. It is their champion genes that command, their hearts obey.
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