Hapless 5,000m runner from Solomon Islands is cheered all the way home by 40,000 crowd as England's Adam Gemili qualifies fastest from 100m heats with 10.15sec
Not so lonely long-distance runner: Rosefelo Siosi had 40,000 people cheering him to the finish line in Glasgow
They came expecting Mo Farah, and were rewarded instead by the strange but stirring spectacle of a lone straggler from the Solomon Islands. If the 40,000 vociferous fans at Hampden Park were dismayed at being denied the one transcendent star of the 5,000 metres – and Usain Bolt in the 100m heats, for that matter – they concealed it brilliantly, as last man Rosefelo Siosi completed his two final laps entirely tout seul, to be assailed by a crescendo of noise that would have embarrassed Eric the Eel.
All the finest sporting spectaculars have a habit of yielding a heroic also-ran like Siosi. At the Sydney Olympics it was, of course, the Eel, otherwise known as Eric Moussambani from Equatorial Guinea, a swimmer so hysterically underqualified that he completed the 100m freestyle in a time slower than the world record for 200m.





