Lagat
plans to keep on rolling
Sabrina Yohannes for the IAAF
31 January 2001 – New York, USA - Olympic bronze-medallist Bernard Lagat of Kenya finished
2001 the second fastest man ever over 1500 metres and he plans to keep his indoor season
on a roll by attacking the 20-year-old meet record at the Millrose Games mile on Friday.
“My coach told me I look better than last year in training,” said Lagat a day after he began the year with a 3:55.16 indoor mile personal best in Boston on Sunday. The record for the highlight Millrose event, the Wanamaker Mile, is Irishman Eamonn Coghlan’s 3:53.0. “After yesterday, I think it is possible,” said Lagat, who said he found Sunday’s run easy and had slowed down towards the end of that race. “If I didn’t ease up like that, I would have just run a 3:54.”
His major challenges on Friday will come in the form of Madison Square Garden’s small banked track and fellow Kenyans Leonard Mucheru and Paul Bitok, the 2001 and repeat former Millrose 3000 metre champions. “And there’s Laban Rotich,” said Lagat of his 2001 world championships teammate. “What I’m going to do is try to run an even pace and at the beginning just stay with the pacemaker. Sometimes I tend to get confused with the laps because of the small laps.”
This year’s meet does not have an elite 3000 metre race. Although Bitok lost to Mucheru in last year’s event, he went on to have a strong year. Mucheru joined the all-time top ten indoor list when he won the Boston 3000 Sunday; and he ran 3:55.54 for the indoor mile on New York’s Armory track on 19 January, despite having traveled the morning of the race from Bermuda where he had won a mile road race the day before. He has beaten Lagat once, over 1500 metres at the Kenyan world championship trials in June.
“The race started really slow and then Leonard took off at 300 metres to go,” said Lagat. “He took off so hard and I followed him so hard too.” The two finished fourth and fifth, neither making the cut. “By the time I was up there, five, ten metres to go, I was tired,” Lagat added. “I should have waited, even up until 150 metres.”
Mucheru suffered a right ankle stress injury shortly afterwards, so he was not in good condition when third-placed Noah Ngeny was dropped from the team in August. “They knew I was injured,” said Mucheru of the team selectors, who drafted Lagat. With a strong season already under his belt, Lagat took silver behind Hicham El Guerrouj in Edmonton and then pushed the Moroccan hard in Brussels, clocking 3:26.34, the second fastest time ever, for himself.
“It was wonderful that I managed to get my personal best and break the Kenyan record that I had always been thinking about,” said Lagat, who added that that achievement and the silver more than made up for his disappointment with the trials. “Being put in the team to go to Edmonton because somebody was dropped – it shouldn’t happen like this, I should earn my place,” he said.
Lagat plans to just run his own race Friday night. “I’m not going to worry about anybody, I’ll be running with the time, because it would be so good to get this 20-year-old record,” he said.
Last year, running with El Guerrouj gave Lagat a new personal best outdoor mile time as well when he ran 3:47.28 in Rome, placing eighth on the all-time list. (Mucheru ran 3:49.76 in that race.) Trying to beat El Guerrouj will be one of Lagat’s goals for the year, something he said he was better able to envision after his last couple of races against the Moroccan world record-holder. Lagat’s 2002 aims also include the World Cup and either the African Championships or Commonwealth Games.
He has done almost all his training in the past year in Pullman, Washington, where he studied – earning bachelor’s degrees in Management Information Systems and Decision Science – at Washington State University, the alma mater of a number of Kenyan runners including former multiple world record-setter Henry Rono, whom Lagat – along with masses of his countrymen -- knew of while growing up in Kenya.
Lagat was back in Kenya for one month in December when he served as a groom at the wedding of one of his best friends, 800-metre Olympian Japhet Kimutai. Lagat, whose full name is Bernard Kipchirchir Lagat, might not yet have become a household word throughout Kenya like Rono was, but his name is omnipresent in at least some households. Kimutai and his wife, Naomi Chepchumba, who is also a runner, have an infant son and they have honored Kimutai’s high school friend by naming their son Bernard Kipchirchir.
After the Millrose Games, where if his record bid succeeds, he will be congratulated by Coghlan himself, Lagat plans to run three more races indoors: in Nebraska, Birmingham and Los Angeles.
