Haile Gebrselassie.

Haile Gebrselassie. Haile Gebrselassie, born in 1973, Ethiopian track-and-field athlete, who won world championship titles in the 10,000-meter race in 1993, 1995, and 1997. During the 1990s he set numerous track-and-field world records, and at the 1996 Olympic Games in Atlanta, Georgia, Gebrselassie won a gold medal in the 10,000-meter competition. In 2007 he set a world marathon record with a time of 2 hours 4 minutes and 26 seconds at the Berlin Marathon. Haile Gebrselassie was raised in ?sela, a mountain village 130 km (80 mi) south of Ethiopia's capital, Addis Ababa. As a boy, he ran several kilometers to and from school each day, because his family did not own a car. He first competed in distance running at age 15. Four years later he won the 5,000-meter and 10,000-meter races at the 1992 junior world championships in Seoul, South Korea. In 1993 at Stuttgart, Germany, Gebrselassie won the first of his 10,000-meter world championships. A year later he began his streak of world record runs, when he ran a 5,000-meter race in 12 minutes 56.96 seconds in Hengelo, Netherlands. Gebrselassie won a second world championship in 1995, and by 1996 he had set world records in four different track-and-field events: the outdoor 5,000-meter and 10,000-meter, and the indoor 3,000-meter and 5,000-meter. In Atlanta that year, Gebrselassie won an Olympic gold medal in the 10,000-meter race. He ran the race unconventionally. Instead of remaining in pace with the rest of the field, Gebrselassie broke from the pack with five laps left in the race. The quickened pace wore out his competitors and earned him an Olympic record time of 27 minutes 7.34 seconds. Gebrselassie captured his third consecutive 10,000-meter world championship in 1997. Beginning that year he battled with other African distance runners to maintain his records. Gebrselassie and his adversaries, including Kenya's Moses Kiptanui and Daniel Komen, Morocco's Salah Hissou, and Algeria's Noureddine Morceli, broke and rebroke one another's records at an astonishing pace in the late 1990s. In 1998 Gebrselassie was named International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF) athlete of the year. That year he also received the Jesse Owens International Trophy Award (now known as the American-International Athlete Trophy Award), which honors sportsmanship and Olympic excellence. In the early 2000s Gebrselassie gradually changed his focus to longer races. In 2006 he shattered the world half marathon record by 21 seconds with a time of 58 minutes 55 seconds. In 2007 he set a new world record in the marathon. Microsoft ® Encarta ® 2009. © 1993-2008 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.