Hicham El Guerrouj

Hicham El Guerrouj









Photo/Foto: George Herringshaw
Date: 13th August 1995








CAREER HIGHLIGHTS:
Silver medal at 1995 World Champs




Hicham El Guerrouj is arguably the greatest athlete never to win an Olympic gold medal. Despite this blemish, El Guerrouj reigned supreme as the world's premier 1500m/1 mile runner in the latter half of the 1990s. His emergence as a middle distance champion came as a surprise to many, as he had concentrated on longer distances earlier in his career, including a third place finish in the 5000m at the 1992 World Junior Championships in Seoul. Indeed, Hicham's best 1500m time had been 3min 51sec set in 1991, before he 'came from nowhere' at Nice on 18 July 1994 to massively improve this to 3min 33.61sec. Four days later he set a personal best of 3min 53.71sec for the mile at the Bislett Games in Oslo. It wasn't long before El Guerrouj started winning major races as well as setting fast times. At the 1995 World Indoor Championships in Barcelona on 11 March, Hicham took the lead in the third lap of the 1500m, and held off all challenges to win the gold medal in 3min 44.54sec. Although El Guerrouj was making rapid improvement, he was still not in the same league as Algerian Noureddine Morceli, who had been unbeaten at either the 1500m or 1 mile since 1992. Their first major confrontation was at the 1995 World Championships held in Gothenburg. In the final, on August 13, the field was still packed together with 600m remaining, with Morceli (see photo above wearing No. 108) poised to strike, and El Guerrouj (No. 875) at his shoulder. Soon after Morceli sprinted away to win easily, but Hicham also finished strongly to win the silver medal. They met again only three days later, in a 1 mile event in Zurich, in which, although Morceli was again the victor, El Guerrouj significantly improved his personal best to 3min 48.69sec. (Ron Casey