Redemption or Retention – Tadese and Bekele prepare to do battle – Edinburgh 2008

Monte-Carlo – On paper it would seem an unusual head-to-head clash on which to promote a championship. Coming into the 36th IAAF World Cross Country Championships, Edinburgh, Scotland (30 March), Eritrean Zersenay Tadese has won just won one of the eleven global championship battles he has had with Ethiopian Kenenisa Bekele during his career.

However, to think that would be to forget the momentous events which occurred last year in the senior men’s race at the World Cross Country Championships in Mombasa, Kenya, where not only did Tadese, the World Road Running champion, win the gold but his chief opponent, Bekele, the reigning five-times long course race titleholder, could not even finish.

Bekele, as three-time World 10,000m champion and 2004 Olympic gold medallist is arguably one of the greatest ever track runners but at cross country with ten individual senior race gold medals (he also won titles 2002-2006 at the now Discontinued short race distance) and one junior crown he is definitively the greatest ever Cross Country runner.

Therefore Tadese’s defeat of Bekele last year in Mombasa was of seismic proportions in the world of distance running. The invincible five-times double champion had been slain, his run of victories halted in the spiritual heartland of the discipline, Kenya.

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