Our Ticket to Glory

Excellent article. May be I should create another blog just to cover Ethiopian Athletes in the upcoming Bejing Olympics. Hmm..... I'll sleep on that for a little bit...

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An Ethiopian obsession that runs deep
By Alex Capstick BBC News, Addis Ababa

Ethiopia has a deep well of distance running talent
Ethiopia is staging its first major international athletics event - the African Athletics Championships - giving sports fans a rare chance to see close up the athletes carrying the country's hopes for glory at the Beijing Olympics. The BBC's Alex Capstick went to Addis Ababa to investigate why running is Ethiopia's national obsession.

It's 0630 as runners gather in the forests overlooking Addis Ababa. There's not a breath of wind, and at an altitude of more than 3,000 metres the air is thin.

These are considered perfect training conditions for endurance runners, and virtually every day of the year thousands of them pitch up here and spend an hour or two pounding the rutted dirt tracks.

Getaneh Tessema is in charge of the group I'm with and says he chooses the area because "it is very quiet, it is not so hilly, flat, and you know running in the forest is fantastic, we like it".
Every morning in the heart of Addis Ababa knots of runners are strung out over the cracked steps of Meskel Square

He has spent the last decade on the lookout for future champions and his current group includes members of the Ethiopian marathon team.

"The runners are mostly from the countryside, and in the countryside most children they go to school on foot - like every day five, 10 kilometres, and you know, nobody knows that, but that's training.

"Ethiopians are light and are also hard-working and they like to fight - and I think that's the reason why they are so good."

Ethiopia's obsession with running can be traced back to 1960, when the barefooted Abebe Bikili was a surprise winner of the Olympic marathon in Rome.

The rest is here