June 24, 2008
A Runner's Quest
More Than Most, Lagat’s Coach Knows China
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By JERÉ LONGMAN
PORTLAND, Ore. — Sunset last Monday
seemed to bring a perfect ending to a perfect day in what so far had
been a perfect year. Bernard Lagat had just finished a nine-mile trail
run as his coach, James Li, followed along on a bike. They had escaped
the desert heat of Arizona for cool shade to train for the Olympic
track and field trials. Then the evening calm was shattered, along with
two windows of the rental car in which they had ridden.
Smash-and-grabbers made off with Lagat’s cellphone and his wallet,
containing several hundred dollars, his driver’s license, his credit
cards and his young son’s social security card. By the time Li and
Lagat called police and canceled the credit cards, the thieves — two
men and a woman, according to witnesses — had added $2,000 worth of
illicit charges.
“They’re probably making meth already,” Lagat, 33, said.
His wife would have to FedEx his passport from Tucson, Ariz.
Otherwise, he would have no identification to get through airport
security and fly home for a few days.
“How will I check out of the hotel?” Lagat said, thinking aloud.
“Don’t worry, I’ll put it on my credit card,” Li said, relieved to
discover that he had left his own wallet back in his room. He smiled.
“I guess I’m the big boss now, with all the money.”
The next afternoon, Lagat and Li resumed training on a secure track
at Nike headquarters in nearby Beaverton, two longtime associates
planning for the Beijing Olympics, one leaving his past behind, the
other returning to a homeland of unimaginable change.
The Olympic trials open Friday in Eugene, Ore. Having won medals
for Kenya at the 2000 and 2004 Summer Games, Lagat is now competing as
an American citizen. Undefeated in seven indoor and outdoor races this
year, he is the reigning world champion at 1,500 meters and 5,000
meters and a gold-medal favorite in Beijing.
Li is Lagat’s personal coach and the associate head coach at the University of Arizona.
He is also the manager of the United States Olympic men’s track team.
There may not be a more vital member of the entire American delegation.
A handsome, soft-spoken man, Li was born in China 47 years ago and
educated at its most prestigious sports institute. Many of China’s top
sports officials are his peers. When no one from the United States
could get a sneak peek inside Beijing’s Olympic Stadium, Li knew whom
to call. One of the stadium managers slept on a bunk above him for four
years in college.
“I believe this is my time,” said Li, who became a United States citizen in 1998.
His own road to the Beijing Olympics has been as winding as the
running trails here. Li came of age during China’s Cultural Revolution,
an attempt by Mao Zedong
to purify the Communist Party and purge intellectuals, which resulted
in violent disorder from the mid-1960s through the mid-1970s.
As a schoolboy, Li remembers organizing “struggle parties” in which
students attacked teachers, wrenching their arms behind their backs. He
remembers his mother being jailed briefly as a so-called
counter-revolutionary. He remembers sports being dismissed as frivolous
and the hunger he felt in his stomach at school and the restrictions
that kept him from watching all but a handful of movies from the time
that he was six until he was 16.
“It was crazy, like you were brainwashed,” Li said.
The changes in China since then, the economic rise, the emerging
openness, seem almost beyond comprehension to him. He finds much to
criticize about China’s record on human rights, Li said, but he also
feels proud that Beijing will host the Summer Games.
“You cannot argue that the Olympics are completely independent from
politics; it never has been,” Li said. “But you cannot make an argument
the other way, by saying that the Olympics should be all about
politics, that because your ideology is not right, you cannot have
them. How far are you going to go? Are we going to bar athletes from
some countries whose ideology we don’t like?
“The ideal of the Olympic Games is we are there, through sports, to
promote exchange, understanding and goodwill among young people in the
world, regardless of their ideology.”
The son of a father who is a retired metallurgical engineer father
and a mother who is a retired sports official, Li became a top
collegiate 800-meter runner while attending the Beijing Institute of
Physical Education in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Still, his
journey toward this moment began as randomly as the vandalism of
Lagat’s credit cards.
In 1984, after China ignored the Soviet boycott and competed at the
Summer Games in Los Angeles, Li was asked to examine a résumé that
landed on his desk at the Sichuan Sports Institute in Chengdu, China.
The resume belonged to John Chaplin, a renowned track and field coach
from Washington State, who had met Chinese officials during the
Olympics and a cultural exchange at the university.
“I got picked purely by chance,” said Li, then a young coach. “No one around me spoke any English, and I spoke some.”
When Chaplin went to China later in 1984 on a sports exchange
program, his translator struggled with the term “starting blocks.” Li
took over as translator and apparently made a great first impression.
By 1985, he was a graduate assistant on Chaplin’s staff at Washington
State.
Four years later, Li was completing work on a doctorate degree and
was scheduled to return to China. Again, his career took an unplanned
detour when the bloody crackdown on students occurred in Tiananmen
Square. Li was left dispirited, and decided to remain in the United
States.
“In that political atmosphere, I felt I would not have the kind of future I would have liked professionally,” Li said.
In 1990, he became head track coach at Mankato State University in
Minnesota, and later returned to Washington State in 1994. Always, he
was on the lookout for a great miler. Upon arriving in the United
States, Li had become engrossed in the performance of Britain’s Roger
Bannister, who had run the first sub-four-minute mile three decades
earlier in 1954.
Li had been so isolated in China that he had never heard of
Bannister’s achievement. Even if he had, the mile would have meant
little in a country that used the metric system. He first learned of
Bannister from a tape of a discontinued television series, called
“Numero Uno,” produced in 1982 by the documentary filmmaker Bud
Greenspan.
“It became my great motivation,” Li said. “Man versus machine. What
the human body could accomplish. Not just the physical aspect but the
spiritual side of it.”
Finally, his own star miler arrived at Washington State in 1996. A
Kenyan runner there named Eric Kamau kept urging Li to recruit one of
his friends, Bernard Lagat, known as Kip.
“He is so good, his stride is so beautiful,” Kamau told Li. “I wish I had his stride.”
When Lagat arrived in the summer of 1996, though, a knee injury
left him with a limping gait. For more than two months, he trained for
no more than 20 minutes at a time, Li said, always at a pace above five
minutes a mile. Then, in the Pac-10 Conference cross-country
championships that fall, Lagat finished a surprising seventh,
demonstrating what Li came to believe was his most impressive quality —
he raced at an even higher level than he trained.
“When the big meets come, he delivers,” Li said.
At the 2000 Sydney Olympics, Lagat won a bronze medal at 1,500
meters for Kenya. At the 2004 Athens Olympics, he took silver. With
Hicham el-Guerrouj of Morocco, the reigning Olympic champion and
world-record holder now retired, Lagat is favored to complete the medal
set with a gold for the United States in Beijing.
“I don’t think Kip would totally agree, but in 2004 I’m not sure he
really thought he was going to beat el-Guerrouj,” Li said. “Winning the
world championship last year gave him a lot of confidence. Hopefully,
that will prove crucial.”
Together for 12 years, a rarity for a track star and a coach in the
United States, Lagat and Li have built their relationship on candor,
respect, professional distance and a willingness to challenge sporting
conventions. Many distance runners train twice a day and run 125 or so
miles a week. Lagat has maintained his health and sharpness by training
once a day and running about 65 to 70 miles a week.
“If I’ve been able to do one thing, it is to liberate myself from what is written in a book,” Li said.
After Lagat won his double victory at the 2007 world track and
field championships, Li was named USA Track and Field’s coach of the
year. Chinese officials then asked him to train Xing Huina, who won a
gold medal in the women’s 10,000 meters at the Athens Olympics, but now
had dead legs. Li worked with her futilely for several months,
discovering that she was severely overtrained.
“I cannot turn rocks into gold,” he told Chinese authorities.
Extreme training has been a hallmark in China since at least 1993,
when women runners coached by Ma Junren gave startling and suspicious
performances, having run a marathon per day in training and supposedly
having gained endurance from eating turtle soup and caterpillar fungus.
In 2000, Ma was discredited when he and six of his runners were
removed from China’s team for the Sydney Olympics, after the runners
showed questionable results on blood tests. It was a sign that Chinese
officials were willing to adhere to international standards as they
sought to host the Olympic Games. In that light, it seems extremely
unlikely that Chinese runners would again come out of nowhere to win
gold medals in Beijing, Li said.
“They know they can’t get away with what they did before,” Li said,
adding that he believed that whatever doping now occurred in China was
not state-sponsored. “I could not have said that 10 or 15 years ago.”
China’s most eagerly anticipated event in Beijing will be the men’s
110-meter hurdles. A countryman, Liu Xiang, is the defending Olympic
champion and was the world-record holder until Dayron Robles of Cuba
lowered the mark earlier this month. There is so much pressure on Liu
that he seems “like a prisoner in his own country,” Li said.
A loss by Liu would leave China devastated, Li said, adding
half-jokingly that he may want to go into hiding himself so he would
not have to witness the fallout. “Not because I don’t want anybody to
see me, but because I don’t want to see the look on people’s faces,” Li
said. “They may set his house on fire or throw rocks at it.”
His last trip to China was last month, for Olympics business and to
check on his aging parents, who live only about 50 miles from the
epicenter of the country’s devastating earthquake. For 48 hours after
the quake struck, Li said, he panicked until he learned that they were
O.K. and that their apartment building had survived intact.
Compared with an earthquake, vandalism of a rental car and stolen
credit cards were a relatively minor annoyance. Still, an agitated
Lagat had not warmed down properly after his workout that day, and 24
hours later, his calves felt sore. Li took notice and eased up slightly
on the next workout. It was what he appreciated most about his coach,
Lagat said.
“He understands where you are coming from and is willing to make
adjustments,” Lagat said of Li. “He doesn’t carry that title of Dr. Li
around in his head.”
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