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News05 Oct 2000


Saudi Arabia's new prodigy

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Sabrina Yohannes for the IAAF

6 October 2000 - Sydney Olympic silver-medallist Hadi Soua’an Al-Somayli had no thoughts of a career in hurdling when he was growing up in Saudi Arabia, but the 23-year-old has now twice given Olympic 400-metre hurdles champion Angelo Taylor of the U.S. a run for his money.

Al-Somaily, who finished less than five hundredths of a second behind Taylor in Sydney and at the grand prix final in Doha, was a teenage football player when a running coach spotted him and launched a career that brought Saudi Arabia’s first Olympic medal.

Al-Somaily, who was born the son of a military man in the city of Taif in southwestern Saudi Arabia, had joined some friends on a run in order to develop endurance for his neighborhood football team games, when he caught the coach’s attention.

"I need you," Al-Somaily said the coach told him.

Al-Somaily began running then and after competing in the 400-metre hurdles a few years later, he stayed with the event, catching the eye of another coach: the famed John Smith of the California-based HSI group that includes sprinters Maurice Greene and Ato Boldon.

"I saw someone with a lot of potential," said Smith. "He has a perfect body for a 400-metre hurdler: long limbs, good endurance, great patience, the eye of a tiger."

Al-Somaily has made good on that potential and grown in self-confidence as well over the years. He made the Saudi team for the 1996 Atlanta Olympics, and although he didn’t get to the finals there or at the Seville World Championships last year, he won the 1999 Pan-Arab Games.

An elementary school physical education teacher in the Saudi capital of Riyadh, Al-Somaily has been training in California with Smith for much of the past year, after staying there on and off for a few years before that.

Lausanne Grand Prix meeting in July, where Al-Somaily won in a then-personal best time of 48.33 seconds marked a turning point in his career and level of confidence, according to Smith.

But it wasn’t until after some particularly good training sessions in Sydney that Al-Somaily really believed he was a gold medal contender. "Then I started to trust myself," he said.

He improved his personal best to 48.14 seconds, setting a new Asian record, when he won his heat in the semifinal, before lowering both to 47.53 in the final.

In Sydney, Al-Somaily received the praise of H. H. Prince Nawaf al Saud, a member of Saudi royalty and the national athletics federation president, for earning the country’s first medal since its participation in the Olympics in 1972.

His confidence reinforced by his Olympic achievement, Al-Somaily came to Doha believing he could triumph and his narrow margin of defeat in his 48.18 second finish suggests the day he beats a similar world-class field is not far off.

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