Bernard Barmasai

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Bernard Barmasai medal table
Bernard Barmasai (right) at the 2006 Amsterdam Marathon
Bernard Barmasai (right) at the 2006 Amsterdam Marathon

Long distance runner

KenyaKenya Kenya
World championships
bronze 1997 Athens 3000 mH
bronze 2001 Edmonton 3000 mH
Commonwealth Games
silver 1998 Kuala Lumpur 3000 mH
Pan-African Games
gold 1995 Harare 3000 mH
African Championships
gold 1998 Dakar 3000 mH

Bernard Barmasai (born May 6, 1974 in Keiyo ) is a Kenyan long-distance runner . He had been one of the world's best obstacle runners since the mid-1990s before specializing in marathons from 2004 .

Career as an obstacle runner

He celebrated his first significant success at international level in the obstacle course in 1995 at the African Games in Harare , when he took the title in 8: 27.15 minutes.

He had probably the most successful season of his entire career in 1997. First, he finished sixth in the endurance race at the World Cross Country Championships in Turin and won the team championship with Kenya. Then he won the bronze medal at the World Athletics Championships in Athens over 3000 meters obstacle. With a time of 8: 06.04 min he reached the finish at the same time as his compatriot Moses Kiptanui , who had won the three previous world championships, and was only two tenths of a second behind the winner, Wilson Boit Kipketer . A week later, the newly crowned world champion improved the world record Moses Kiptanuis by a tenth of a second to 7: 59.08 min. But just a few days later, on August 24th, Bernard Barmasai clearly increased the world record to 7: 55.72 minutes at the ASV-Sportfest in Cologne , beating Moses Kiptanui, who also remained under Wilson Boit Kipketer's record time. Barmasai's record lasted for exactly four years until the Moroccan Brahim Boulami undercut it in Brussels . Even today (as of March 2013), Barmasai ranks fifth in the all-time world best list.

In 1998 Barmasai won the African Championships in Dakar and set a new championship record with his winning time of 8: 11.74 minutes. At the Commonwealth Games in Kuala Lumpur that year , he won the silver medal in the obstacle course. With 8: 15.37 min he had to admit defeat to his victorious compatriot John Kosgei by only three hundredths of a second.

At the World Athletics Championships in Seville in 1999 , he couldn't quite live up to expectations and ended up fifth in the obstacle course in 8: 13.51 minutes. However, a little later in Munich he won the IAAF Grand Prix Final , the predecessor of the World Athletics Final , with 8: 06.92 minutes . Shortly before, Barmasai had caused a scandal when the IAAF World Athletics Association had removed him from the rating of the Golden League series for manipulation . Apparently he had asked the eventual world champion Christopher Koskei to deliberately let him win at the world class athletics meeting in Zurich shortly before the world championships.

At the Olympic Games in Sydney in 2000 , Barmasai narrowly missed a medal in 8: 22.23 minutes in fourth. The following year, however, he managed to win the bronze medal at the World Athletics Championships in Edmonton . He reached the goal in 8: 16.59 minutes behind his compatriot, the reigning Olympic champion Reuben Kosgei , and Ali Ezzine from Morocco. It was Barmasai's last significant success as an obstacle runner.

Switch to the marathon

After struggling with persistent knee problems since 2001, Barmasai finally decided at the end of 2003 to end his career on the track and switch to marathon running.

In 2004, after finishing sixth in the Paris Half Marathon in 1:02:05 h in March , he made his full-distance debut at the Rotterdam Marathon in April. There he was fifteenth in 2:14:49 h. Things went better for him at the 2005 Amsterdam Marathon when he finished fourth in 2:10:52 h.

2006 was followed by the most successful season of his road running career to date . In the spring he set a new personal best at 2:08:52 h in the Paris Marathon and came third. In September he reached second place at the Greifensee run . A month later he also finished second in the Amsterdam Marathon in 2:08:54 h. He was only two seconds behind the winner, his compatriot Solomon Busendich .

After Barmasai gave up the race at the Vienna City Marathon prematurely in 2007, he started at the Hamburg Marathon in 2008 . Up to halfway through the race he belonged to a large group of leaders, but was later unable to keep up the pace. In the end he finished fifteenth in 2:13:12 h, just under six minutes behind the winner, David Mandago . At the Frankfurt Marathon in the same year, Barmasai did not finish.

Others

Bernard Barmasai is 1.73 m tall and has a competition weight of 55 kg.

Top performances

Train:

Street:

  • Half marathon : 1:02:05 h, March 7, 2004, Paris
  • Marathon: 2:08:52 h, April 9, 2006, Paris

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ IAAF: 3000 Meters Steeplechase - men - senior - outdoor , IAAF
  2. ↑ Berliner Zeitung: IAAF suspends Barmasai , August 31, 1999
  3. ^ IAAF: Barmasai is on the road to further glory ( Memento of November 21, 2003 in the Internet Archive ) , November 19, 2003
personal data
SURNAME Barmasai, Bernard
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Kenyan long distance runner
DATE OF BIRTH May 6, 1974
PLACE OF BIRTH Keiyo , Kenya