Mo Katir trembles. The nervous hand, the broken voice: he is not comfortable. He has journalists in front of him and it is not his thing. He barely answers two questions and leaves when he is about to start the third. He has just qualified for the final of the 5,000 meters this Sunday (8:20 p.m., Eurosport and Teledeporte) and the recorder reveals his time in the mixed zone: one minute and 11 seconds. In fact, days before, when he was eliminated from the 1,500 meters of this World Cup, he already went to the locker room without speaking, without giving a single answer. He is not unpleasant, nor does he show antipathy towards the press: he is a runner. He just runner. And everything else hardly matters to him, he hardly works on it, he hardly influences him.
“It’s normal that I don’t speak if things don’t work out for me. I prefer to be alone, turning my head around and waiting to be me again,” he explains and does not stop touching a small black bracelet that he wears on his left wrist. Katir is an enigma for all Spanish athletics. He is the benchmark on the track, the best option for a medal after fourth place in Adrian Ben This Saturday in the 800 meters, a rising star, but it is hard to know how he is, what moves him, what interests him when he is not running.
“I’m surrounded by very good people, my family, my girlfriend, my coach, my manager. If these people don’t doubt me, I don’t have to keep my head down, I don’t have to doubt myself,” he comments, between the lines It is understood that in this World Cup he has had a bad time. His goodbye to the 1,500 meters – where he hung the bronze at the Eugene World Cup last year – was a disappointment. Perhaps he is not in his best shape -he is supposed to be-, perhaps it was a simple slip or perhaps it really affected the competition he has in Spain, as he argued Adel Mechaalhis opponent at home.
Since he reached the elite a couple of years ago, a finalist in the Tokyo 2020 Olympic Games, Katir practically lives in the Sierra Nevada High Performance Center where he can train at 2,300 meters of altitude and forget about everything else. There he shares sessions with close runners like Mohamed Attaoui o Thierry I’m the one, but he also lives with others with whom he has less feeling. One of them is Jakob Ingebrigtsenwho spends seasons in the heights of Granada, to his ball, without interacting with almost anyone and another is Adel Mechaal.
They say that, although they eat at the same hours and train at the same hours, Katir and Mechaal never get together. They are rivals, the two great Spanish long-distance runners, and they want to remain just rivals. If one warms up on the track to one side, the other does so to the opposite side. And from such a close distance they are feeding a complex relationship. Mechaal himself revealed that before the Spanish Championship that was held in July both lowered the intensity of their sessions: they had to beat each other, it was the most important thing. A matter of pride, a bad idea with the World Cup so close.