I was and am a big bekele fan and I loved the many ways he could win a race, e.g. a grinding, sub-26:50 10k duel with Tadese in 2009 followed by outsprinting Lagat in a relatively slow 5k.
when Mo Farrah started dominating, I lost a lot of interest in track — in part because I was suspicious of his meteoritic mid-career rise and in part because all races with him were basically the same. So I really want to believe that price Bekele could take all comers — Jakob, Mo, whoever.
but the fact is, Mo and Jakob have a combo of mid-distance and long-distance chops that is really hard to contend with.
People are really underrating Mo’s closing 2:19 1k finish if they think Bekele could have definitely beaten that. We’ll never know but what we see is that Mo optimized for winning championship races like no one ever before. Bekele complained about this in 2012 if I recall — said maybe he’d win too if he used the same gimmicks. But like, my man, the point running is to cross the finish line first — Anything permitted that helps you do that, you should do. (Anyone else remember that Times article about Bekele’s sub-2 efforts that suggested he was really resistant to trying new things? )
And with Jakob, we never really saw prime Bekele go head-to-head with a 3:27/12:4x runner, partly because there have only been a handful of people that fit in all of history.
so I’d like to believe Bekele could crush them all. But I’m just not seeing it.
