Brunei Ain't Any Country I Ever Heard of…They Speak English in Brunei

As a runner for a good time of my life - good time meaning I enjoyed it, not that I spent long actually doing it - I maintain a healthy (insert "un" where you may) interest in the goings on of the sport on levels from high school to professional. With the World Championships taking place in Osaka as I type, it's an exciting time for track nerds like me. Because most races, even up to at least the 5k for me, seem so short, a lot of times the result and the race don't live up to the hype I've somehow created for them. That being said, much earlier today, which was only maybe three or four hours ago in Japan, technically, in a way of speaking, if you want to make things needlessly confusing, which I sometimes do, the final of the men's 1500m run was contested. As the metric mile, it's in many ways the bread and butter of track and field, although with the possibly waning popularity of bread and butter, the lamb and tunafish of track and field might be a more apt descriptor. This is not to say that it is the most popularly viewed event, that spot reserved for one of the sprints of either 100m, 200m, or 400m, but if races were hot dogs (and I hate hot dogs because of the nasty burps and the unknown contents), the 1500m would be Hebrew National brand: not necessarily the best-selling, but certainly the best quality. The only problem with that analogy is that, because I don't eat hot dogs, I really have no idea what I'm talking about, but sometimes you just gotta trust in the Heebs.

The 1500m was won this year by Bernard Lagat (pictured below), a naturalized American citizen hailing originally from Kenya. I was very glad to see Lagat grab the gold as he's always been slightly in the shadow of the now-retired Hicham El-Guerrouj and has always struck me as a swell dude despite one positive sample test for EPO which, if you ever hear anything about cycling and the Tour de France, is one of the more popular PEDs (performance-enhancing drugs, not those dudes who have to register when they move into your neighborhood) on the market these days as it stimulates red blood cell production, and thus increases the body's ability to intake oxygen and stave off lactic acid, the bastard friend of oxygen debt that us regular folks might know as that intense burning when we exert ourselves athletically. Anyway, in the first non-Olympic track meet I ever watched, the 1999 NCAA outdoor championships, Lagat took down defending NCAA champ Seneca Lassiter, so things sort of came full circle with his defeating defending World Champion Rashid "I Heart Drugs" Ramzi. I must quickly point out that this is simply my own unsubstantiated opinion. Lagat actually has a positive test on his record and still I trust him being clean over Ramshit. I was really hoping for a duel between Lagat and Webb, but it was not to be. Maybe at the Olympics.

Since I was hating on ABC news in my last entry for using shoddy sources (which are likely correct in this instance, but still shoddy, but maybe I should credit ABC for being resourceful? Only if they stop stretching out my favorite shows and making them suck balls), I should probably point out the simple and blatant factual errors I noted when I went to read this article about Lagat's victory. When I originally read it, the time was incorrectly attributed as 3:44.77 seconds or, a little less than 20 seconds faster than I used to be able to run, but later amended to 3:34.77 or, a little less than 30 seconds faster than I used to be able to run. Honestly, that didn't bother me at all, it was this phrase: "Biologically, it was a Kenyan sweep. Kenyan-born Rashid Ramzi was second, running for Brunei." Nevermind that Ramshit does not look remotely Kenyan, there is also the simple fact that he was born in Morocco before taking up citizenship in Bahrain which is definitely not Brunei. I'm not pretending to be some know-it-all here. In fact, I am pretty sure I had never heard of Brunei until it was mentioned erroneously in this article. I also make more than my fair share of mistakes, but I'm also not paid to write and don't have fact checkers.

Anyway, I've rambled on for long enough with my diarrhea of the mouth as usual, which is probably superior to the diarrhea I got from eating Indian food for lunch. I guess it really just depends on your definition of superior.


Lagat Rated