COMMENTARY

Tegenkamp willing to go the distance

BEIJING | Matt Tegenkamp is running against history. He knows that, of course. The Olympic event he has chosen — or the event that chose him — is the 5,000 meters, and everyone all around the world knows that Americans can’t run it.

Well, hey, we live in a country of sprinters. Our daily lives involve sprints — sprint to the grocery store, to the bank, to the McDonald’s. All our sports involve sprints — you can’t run much more than 100 yards in football, can’t run much more than 90 yards in baseball, you probably won’t run hard more than 30 yards in any given moment in basketball. Tennis just involves charging the net or running back and forth on the baseline. Golf is only a race to the bar after the final hole. And so on.

Sprinters. That’s who we are. Carl Lewis. Jesse Owens. Bob Hayes. Maurice Greene. I once asked a track coach why Americans have had so little success at the long distances like 5,000 and 10,000 meters, and he answered in one word: Cars.

There’s something to that. Tegenkamp puts it another way: In America, when someone messes up in sports or in gym, what happens? The coach or teacher makes them run a lap. Running fast is fun. Running long is punishment.

Somehow, though, Tegenkamp fell in love with this stuff. Probably had something to do with his family back in Lee’s Summit — all the Tegenkamps ran distance. Craig, the dad, always believed there were lessons in those longer races, and that kids who ran them tended to be good and solid kids.

And Matt has a talent for distance running — he earned 10 All-America honors at Wisconsin, he set the American record over two miles (about 3,218 meters), he ran the 5,000 at a very fast 13:04 a couple of years ago, he qualified in the 5,000 at the Olympic trials despite having a pretty severe cramp in his side.

Then he qualified for Saturday’s final, and here he would find out what the fuss is about. They have run the 5,000 every Olympics since 1912, and the United States has won exactly one gold medal and one bronze medal, and that was in the same race, in 1964, in a downpour in Tokyo. Bob Schul, a guy from Ohio and a former world-record holder, had a great kick in the mud and chased down France’s Michel Jazy in the last 200 meters. An Oregonian named Bill Dellinger also caught Jazy, who completely ran out of juice, and Dellinger won the bronze.

That’s just about the whole history of the American 5,000 at the Olympics. The good part, anyway.

The race began, and Tegenkamp settled into the middle of the pack. Thing is, he did not look especially comfortable. He would say after the race that he just didn’t have it, and it wasn’t hard to see. The thing about the 5,000 — the reason it might be the most ferocious race — is that the pace is devastating. It’s not an all-out sprint like the 400, and it’s not a define-your-own-pace race like the marathon.

No, the race is as fast as the best runners in the world want to make it. In this case, the pacesetter was the remarkable Ethiopian Kenenisa Bekele, who has won the 10,000 at each of the last two Olympics and whose finishing kick is feared throughout the world.

Bekele determined this was going to be a fast race. He decided he would try to wear out his opponents. He moved toward the front, and that pushed the runners … everyone knew that with Bekele’s big finish they would have to stay somewhat close or they would get left way behind. The others would talk later about how it was a brilliant strategy, and it probably was, but realistically that’s like saying that hitting four homers in a game is a brilliant strategy or singlehandedly sacking a quarterback seven times is a great strategy. Nobody else in the world is talented enough to have done what Bekele did.

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To reach Joe Posnanski, call 816-234-4361 or send e-mail to jposnanski@kcstar.com. For previous columns, go to KansasCity.com.