Well, yes and no. Japan Running News, often quoted or linked on LetsRun, had this recently: "The first meet of the 2011 Hokuren Distance Challenge series took place June 19 in Kitami, Hokkaido. With cooler than usual temperatures 2006 world 10000 m junior champion and 2008 world junior XC champion Ibrahim Jeilan (Ethiopia/Team Honda) delivered the biggest result of the evening, a solo 27:09.02 nearly a minute ahead of runner-up Alex Mwangi (Kenya/Team YKK). Jeilan's time was the third-fastest of the year by an Ethiopian, putting him into consideration for the Ethiopian team for August's Daegu World Championships."Suggests the guy had not lost his form, but taken a life path to Japan. As for Farah kicking early, he lost by .26 seconds and kicked quite well. If he wins, we call it well timed. If he loses, to a stunning and amazing and clearly highly motivated finished, with nobody else close, we say too early? That's like an announcer using tape delay and pretending to "predict" the outcome of a race when they already know the result. Farah lost to an unexpected kicker. One folks are saying "where did he come from" about his last few years. So yes, hindsight is 20/20 as the cliche goes.
Yeah, but... wrote:
elton wrote:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ibrahim_JeilanGeneral rule: if an Ethiopian runner has a .en wikipedia article that's seven paragraphs long, and you've never heard of him, you're not much of a distance running fan.
To be fair, though, there's NOTHING there from after 2009. That is to say, what the hell was he doing in 2010, or even earlier this year? I think the "coming out of nowhere" effect is due to the fact that it seems he hasn't done anything of note for the past two years, and he wasn't a big name on the senior level before that.