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.
In London in 2012, it was an especially hapless rower named Hamadou Djibo Issaka from Niger, a country not renowned for its abundance of lakes. But here, on the first day of Glasgow’s Commonwealth Games athletics programme, it was 17-year-old Siosi, the Solomons’ two-time sportsman of the year. He finished the 5,000m 2½ laps behind Kenyan winner Caleb Mwangangi Ndiku, in a time of 16min 55.33sec. There are under-14s who have run the distance faster than that.
Still, for a few minutes Siosi was treated to a cacophonous Glaswegian reception. The ‘Hampden roar’ is a term so embedded in local lexicon that it has become rhyming slang for “What’s the score?” and for this valiant teenager it was turned up to such ear-splitting volume that Allan Wells, Scotland’s Olympic champion in 1980, suggested that this citadel of football should be turned permanently into an athletics stadium. We could safely surmise that the occasion, even denuded of Farah, had been a hit.
On these stages, the start of the track and field is so often a litmus test for success. Sebastian Coe claimed that he knew beyond any last doubts that the Olympics in London had captivated the nation when 80,000 people turned up on a Friday morning to watch the triple-jump qualifying. The capacity crowd at Hampden on Sunday was, likewise, an auspicious sign that these Commonwealths were in clover. The opening evening session on Monday, culminating in the 100m final, should tell us more.
If early form in the 100 is any gauge, then England’s Adam Gemili is poised to grasp a medal. Gemili, who again showed the sense of his decision to swap seven years at Chelsea’s academy for a career as a sprinter, was the fastest qualifier from the heats in 10.15sec, eclipsing Nigeria’s Monzavous Edwards by more than two tenths and beaming when he saw his time. “I’m loving it,” he said, although Michael Johnson was unimpressed by his reaction.
The 400m world record-holder was famously scornful of the perceived arrogance of Mark Lewis-Francis, England’s silver medallist in the last Commonwealth 100m final in Delhi, and gave Gemili the benefit of his opinion in strong terms.
“I wasn’t that excited by Gemili’s performance,” Johnson, a BBC analyst in Glasgow, said. “What has impressed me so much over the last couple of years is his technique, and he looked a little tight. He hasn’t run in a while and has been through a coaching change, so that may have something to do with it. When he runs well, I would like to see him look a little more as if he expects it, rather than, ‘Oh my God, that was really great’.”
Gemili, however, was satisfied both by his display and his apparent adoption as a hometown favourite. “To come out and hear that cheer makes you want to push a bit harder, so I am truly grateful for the reaction.”
He will be joined in the semi-finals on Monday by fellow English contenders Richard Kilty and Harry Aikines-Aryeetey, even if they each only qualified as fastest losers. Kilty, who was involved in a dead-heat in second with Simon Magakwe of South Africa, used his progress to dedicate his Games campaign to friend David Zikhali, who drowned last Monday in an accident in the River Tees. The 20-year-old, born in Stockton, said: “David was the most loving guy you will ever meet. He was always laughing, always joking. He was loved by everyone across Stockton.”
As the world 60m indoor champion, Kilty is intending to leave his imprint at these Games, but even into a headwind his time of 10.34 was unconvincing. The same was true of Aikines-Aryeetey, still toiling to convert his stellar junior career into a major senior performance, as he trailed in third in the fourth heat in 10.33.
How the 100m cried out for an injection of the stardust of Bolt, who in all his years of dominance has never bothered with the event at the Commonwealth Games. But given that he has pinned his colours to the sprint relay, we will have to make do with the Jamaican second string of Nickel Ashmeade and Jason Livermore, the men most likely to shut out Gemili.
To judge by the good humour with which the Glasgow spectators transferred their affections from Farah to an unknown from the South Pacific, they will quite happily adjust.
