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He does so with plans in mind to step back to the distance at which

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He does so with plans in mind to step back to the distance at which he made his mark as an emerging teenage talent. "I am running the 5,000m in Zurich this summer," El Guerrouj said, fingering the lesser gold of the world indoor championship 3,000m medal he won in Lisbon a fortnight ago, "and I am going for the world record."It was said matter-of-factly, virtually in passing, as El Guerrouj, an unassuming, pragmatic soul, looked to the future in the wake of his shock defeat in Sydney and rehabilitation to international championship competition in Lisbon. The news, however, will send a huge ripple of anticipation around the athletics world.At the Letzigrund Stadion on 17 August, in Zurich's annual Weltklasse meeting, the man who has pushed the prized world records of the middle distances to new boundaries, running 3min 26.00sec for 1500m and 3:43.13 for the mile, will be venturing up to long-distance territory with the intention of setting new figures for 5,000m. Only two men have held the world records at all three distances: the Finn Paavo Nurmi in the 1920s and the Swede Gunder Haag in the 1940s.News of El Guerrouj's intention will be of particular interest to Haile Gebrselassie. The Ethiopian has broken the 5,000m record on four occasions and it currently stands to his name, at 12min 39.36sec, a time he recorded in Helsinki three years ago. El Guerrouj is unsure of his exact potential at the distance. "But I know I am able to run it in less than 12min 40sec," he said.

"I know I can run more than one minute faster than my personal best when I was a junior."That personal best, 13:46.67, was set in the Olympic Stadium in Seoul in September 1992. It earned the 18-year-old El Guerrouj a bronze medal, 13 seconds behind a victorious young Ethiopian by the name of Haile Gebrselassie. At that time, El Guerrouj had been a runner for only three years - since his mother told him to find a new sport because she was sick of washing the muddied goalkeeper's jersey he wore for the local youth team in Berkane, an agricultural town in Morocco's north-eastern corner, near the Algerian border.It was the hero who inspired him to take up running as an alternative, Said Aouita, the 1984 Olympic 5,000m champion and breaker of world records at 1500m and 5,000m (but not the mile), who persuaded El Guerrouj that his basic speed would be better suited to shorter distances than 5,000m. And since then the restaurant owner's son has emerged as the world's fastest-ever middle-distance runner.

His mile record, 3:43.13, recorded in Rome two years ago, would have left Sebastian Coe 30 metres adrift in the home straight and Roger Bannister still rounding the final bend.A keen student of track-and-field history, El Guerrouj once confided: "My dream was always to become a two-time Olympic 1500m champion, just like Sebastian Coe. My dream was to win in Atlanta and then in Sydney." It was not to be. In the 1500m final in Atlanta El Guerrouj tripped at the bell while looking poised for victory. In the 1500m final in Sydney he was passed 30m from the line by Noah Ngeny of Kenya. It was the biggest shock of the Sydney Games, and the Richter scale of the damage became evident in the press conference room in the bowels of Stadium Australia El Guerrouj broke down in tears. He had not lost a 1500m race since the Olympic final in 1996 and he vowed never to run another one.When he returned to his hotel room with his silver medal, he snatched a framed photograph from his bedside table and threw it in the wastebin. It was a picture of him crying as he stepped off the track in Atlanta.

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