Steven Downes for IAAF
18 March 2001 - Since winning the IAAF world indoor title at 800 metres, the plaudits for 19-year-old Yuri Borzakovskiy from Russia have been full of comparisons with the great middle distance runners of the past.
"The new Coe" boasted the meeting promoters of Sunday’s indoor international meeting in Glasgow, Scotland. "The new Ovett" suggested others.
"It’s all complete nonsense," said Steve Ovett, the 1980 Olympic 800 metres gold medallist. "Borzakovskiy is far more talented at 800 metres than I ever was."
Comparisons are always odious, but last Sunday in Lisbon, Portugal, as Borzakovskiy coolly waited his time before launching a long-striding, loose-limbed attack on the last 200 metres of the World Indoor championship final, it was as if someone had turned the clock back a quarter of a century, to the days when Ovett – often wearing a prized, deep red Soviet Union national vest – would stride into the home straight, his finishing kick leaving his rivals looking like selling platers as he would wave to the cheering crowds.
When Ovett enjoyed his finest two minutes in Moscow more than 20 years ago, Borzakovskiy had not even been born. Baby Yuriy arrived in the town of Zhukovskiy, 20 miles outside Moscow, in 1981. He would not have been old enough to remember watching the last of Ovett’s many world record runs.
But the Russian teenager has learned enough about his sport in the three years since he (literally) burst on to the scene, down the home straight of the European Cup 800m, to know well the two great middle distance heroes from Britain, Ovett and his rival Sebastian Coe. "It is an honour to be mentioned in the same breath as them," Borzakovskiy said.
"When I was young and first took up running, Coe and Ovett were always known to be the best of the best."
Now Ovett, who travels the world doing promotional work and TV commentaries for the IAAF, believes that Borzakovskiy could join him and Coe in the pantheon of Olympic champions.
"Lisbon last week was the first time that I had seen him racing first-hand," Ovett said, "and he was very impressive indeed. He looks like he could be very good. He could be the best the Russians have had since the USSR's Arzhanov," referring to the runner whose four-year unbeaten streak was ended narrowly by the United States’s Dave Wottle in a thrilling 1972 Olympic final.
What impresses Ovett so much about Borzakovskiy is his natural speed – he is good enough to have been included in Russia’s 4x400m relay squad – and his tactical coolness. Again, there are similarities with Ovett, a former English Schoolboy champion at 400 metres.
"He is very fast and he seems to have an old head on young shoulders," Ovett said. "He seems to use the same tactics every time, sitting at the back and running even pace. It makes it look like you are finishing quicker than everyone else, when in fact, all you are doing is running at the same speed, while everyone else slows down. But it is the most efficient way to run the race, and it will work in 95 per cent of his races – much the same way as it used to work for me.
"Those tactics are fine when you are racing at 1min 44sec pace. But he might have problems when he gets in a race and they are running 1:42 – if they do that, then he’s not going to catch them. Maybe that’s where he came unstuck at the Olympics."
The Olympics are the one blot on Borzakovskiy’s copybook, although a sixth place at the age of 19 is barely a blemish at all. "He’s done everything that you could expect of an athlete of his age to have done," said Ovett, who learned much from his fifth place in the 1976 Olympic final, when he was 21.
Borzakovskiy explained that he was not fully fit in Sydney last year, a twisted ankle having robbed him of some vital pre-Games training. "I was just pleased to get as far as the final," he said.
Sunday’s was his last indoor race of the year, before he gets back to training for the summer outdoor season. "I know it is outdoors which really counts. But I enjoy racing indoors, and if I can be successful at it, then that is great."
Borzakovskiy plays down his breath-taking talent, the compliments and the hype, even
though his best time, 1min 44.35sec, is the second quickest ever indoors, behind Denmark's
Wilson Kipketer.
"Do you know what is the most wonderful thing about Yuriy Borzakovskiy? He still does
not understand the significance of his achievements," said his team-mate Sergey
Kozhevnikov.
"Yuriy could run 800m in 1:42 or even 1:41 and believe he is doing nothing very special. He has fantastic potential. We must understand that he is an extraordinary runner, very different from the rest of us.
"Sometimes nature produces people with abnormal traits, for example, with six
fingers on their hands. To me, Borzakovskiy falls into this category because of his gift
for running."
Borzakovskiy has been running since he was 10 when, on the local track, he tripped in his
very first race at 600m. "I split my lower lip," he recalled. "I ran
2:10, and finished second to a boy a year older. I raced him two weeks later, ran 1:52,
and beat him."
It was coming under the guidance of his coach, Vyacheslav Evstratov, that Borzakovskiy's
talent was first really spotted. "Yuriy is the winning result of a game played by
nature," he said.
"His physical system is fantastic - only perfect nerve signals are passed to his
muscles. He also has an unusually low heart rate. That is why in training he needs to run
600m at faster than 1:20 pace to raise it. He recovers after hard runs extremely quickly.
"No-one in the team recovers like Borzakovskiy. At first I did not believe that such
a speedy recovery was possible and thought that Yuriy had made a mistake while measuring
his heart rate. He can return to a normal condition and feel good just five minutes after
a competition. At training sessions he is doing the same things as all the other athletes
in my group but the result is very different.
"Yuriy is a golden boy with a big and kind heart. He is also a clever boy who wants
to achieve great goals. Last year a new boy came joined our group. He had nothing, not
even running shoes. And Yuriy gave him his favourite shoes, the ones he had used to win at
the European Cup. 'He needs them more than I do,' he said to me. 'I remember how other
runners helped me when I was a small boy'."
As far as Britain’s last winner of the Olympic 800 metres title is concerned, that
young boy ought to keep hold of those shoes for more than just training in.
"He’s good enough to win everything between now and the Athens Olympics,"
Ovett says of Borzakovskiy. "He’s young enough, he could even be a threat in
2008."
