Kenenisa Bekele was born on 13 June 1982 in Bekoji, Ethiopia — the same small highland town that produced Tirunesh Dibaba and Derartu Tulu. He came to running through school, not family tradition, and rose through the ranks with a ferocity that made him the dominant distance runner on earth for the better part of a decade. Between 2002 and 2006 he was undefeated at the World Cross Country Championships, winning both the short and long course titles each year — a feat nobody had done before or since. On the track he set world records in the 5,000m and 10,000m that stood untouched for fifteen years, won three Olympic golds across Athens and Beijing, and claimed five world titles.
His marathon career was messier but still punctuated by brilliance. A record-breaking debut in Paris in 2014, a Berlin win in 2016, and then in 2019 a 2:01:41 in Berlin — two seconds off Kipchoge's world record — that reminded the world what he was capable of when injury-free. In 2023, at 41 years old, he ran 2:04:19 at Valencia to set the world masters marathon record by over a minute. The full picture is of an athlete whose ceiling was as high as anyone who ever laced up a racing shoe, perpetually interrupted by a body that couldn't always match the ambition.