Mottram’s destiny: Ending the African dynasty

Australian athletics has seen plenty of hype in the discipline of distance running, but as Sebastian Hassett reports, Craig Mottram looks set to fulfil his potential.

More days like this, please: Craig Mottram wins the 2004 Great Manchester Run.

IT'S almost unnerving that an Australian should be as talented as Craig Mottram when it comes to endurance running.

After all, Africans seem to dominate anything above the 1000 metre mark, and the only elite resistance Australians seem to offer over a kilometre or more appears to be in the swimming pool.

Mottram should know. He was set for a career in triathlon after a glittering junior career, only to ditch the Speedos and the bikes for his running shoes. It hasn’t all been smooth sailing, but things are starting to turn in his favour.

As he prepares for Saturday's Fifth Avenue Mile in New York City, Mottram will no longer be one of the crowd. He will be a front-runner, setting the pace and dictating times. His profile means he is now the hunted. That’s not necessarily a bad thing; it just means the athletics world now knows how good he is.

His performance at the World Championships in Helsinki last month brought to light one of the more phenomenal efforts by an Australian sportsman in recent times. All of a sudden, this tall, gangly white man was on the podium for the 5000 metres after grabbing bronze.

It was a shock to all, except Mottram and his coach Nic Bideau, who had carefully plotted his athlete’s course to the medal ceremony. The divine right to glory for the Africans, who had accumulated every single 5000-metre medal since 1987, had been shattered. And he’s not done with yet. Now he wants to beat them all.

While Dieter Baumann was the last person to ‘achieve’ that very feat in 1992, subsequent drug tests nabbed the German for taking steroids. “I'm nothing like him,” Mottram told a press conference in Zurich a week after the World Championships. “I'm clean. I just work hard.”

It’s that exact work ethic that has enabled him to make the jump into the elite category of the sport. And it’s a fair elite, too. The past decade of five kilometre running has been dominated by none other than the ‘Emperor’, Haile Gebrselassie, and subsequently by his heir apparent, Kenenisa Bekele.

Until last year, the Ethopian duo weren’t looking beyond their own continent for competition. Mottram didn’t even register on the radar; despite having claimed a World Cup victory over 3000 metres in Paris in 2002, his credentials didn’t even warrant him consideration as an outside threat, let alone as a genuine contender.

That was until July last year, when Mottram raised his game to go stride for stride with the Emperor in a memorable battle over 5000 metres at the Crystal Palace meet in London. When Gebrselassie’s famously static left arm swung in that formidably stagnating fashion, Mottram’s right arm went with it, right to the finish line.

Gebrselassie ultimately triumphed, as was expected. The Emperor’s final race in London wasn’t going to be upstaged by some unknown upstart. But Mottram lost no admirers. He had proven he had the right stuff to mix it with the best of them.

The path from that moment has been linear, fluid and positive; Mottram has jumped every hurdle that’s come his way and has raised the bar for consistency in his individual performance, capped by the bronze in Helsinki.

Last week he grabbed an impressive third in a 3000 metre road race in northern England, marking a solid workout before tomorrow’s challenge, one that takes place on one of most famous stretches of pavement in the world.

Following that, the 25-year old returns home to Australia and begins preparations for his next goal: the 2006 Commonwealth Games, set to be held in his native state.

And for once, he’ll not be racing alone against Ethiopians or Kenyans; he’ll be racing with a whole nation riding him home.

“The amount of people watching that know who I am is something I haven't experienced before. But that's why we work so damn hard to get the opportunities like that, to be able to go in front of a home crowd in front of 90,000 at the MCG, and run well. That really is the exciting thing, that every single person there will be cheering for me," he said in Zurich.

Needless to say, Craig Mottram can’t wait for that moment. Neither can we.

•  Have a view on this story? Send us your feedback!