Komen: Sorry, my Mercedes, land offer no longer stands!

For 25 years, Kenya’s Daniel Komen held the world indoor 3,000 metres record at seven minutes, 24.90 seconds.

This gargantuan barrier was set at the Budapest Samsung Cup in Hungary in 1998.
But on Wednesday night at the Meeting Lievin Hauts-de-France Pas-de-Calais in France, Ethiopia’s Lamecha Girma finally broke the barrier, setting a new world record at 7:23.81.

He outpaced Spain’s Mohammed Katir who also ran inside Komen’s record, finishing second in a European record 7:24.68. Komen, 46, is currently a director at Eldoret’s Potters House Academy, which he owns.

Eight-minute barrier

He still holds the outdoor 3,000m world record at 7:20.67, a mark he set in September, 1996, in Rieti (Italy) along with the two-mile world record (7:58.61) that saw him become the first man to break the eight-minute barrier at Hechtel, Belgium, in 1997.

So confident was Komen that his indoor and outdoor 3,000m records would be hard to beat that he offered a brand new Mercedes Benz car and parcel of land within Eldoret to any Kenyan athlete who would eclipse either mark first.

But on Thursday, he regretted that his offer had expired. “No one came close to what I had registered then. After 25 years, my offer has expired and it’s unfortunate that Kenyan athletes missed it,” he said. “I even challenged my competitors then, including Ethiopia’s legends Haile Gebrselassie and Kenenisa Bekele, among others, and I wanted to give them the prize, but no one came close,” added Komen.

On Thursday, he paid glowing tribute to the Ethiopian for diving inside his indoor mark. “I will be travelling to Addis Ababa to meet him and have a word with him,” said Komen.

During the remarkable 1998 race, Komen decided to run from the second lane, terming the indoors competition as more technical and wary that one might easily fall in the inside lane and be disqualified.

He believes that with the new technology, more records are going to be broken.

Wrong shoes

“The world is changing and I know that with the new technology like the wave lights and the shoes, we are going to witness faster times which is also good for the sport. 

“I managed to break the world record then because it was winter and I had trained well despite running with the wrong shoes.

“I used sprinters’ shoes because at the time, my management didn’t specialize in long distance races. If I had the right ones, I would have even run faster but that is now gone and we now need to see who will run faster in the other races,” he said.

After hanging up his spikes in 2007, Komen ventured into business and later invested in the private school in a move he said was “giving back to the community.”