Published on : 02/08/2021 – 14:37
Soufiane El Bakkali won the gold medal at the Tokyo 2021 Olympic Games on Monday, August 2, over 3000 meters steeplechase. Running in 8 minutes, 8 seconds and 90 hundredths, the 25-year-old Moroccan overtook Ethiopia’s Lamecha Girma and Kenyan Benjamin Kigen. The 2017 vice-world champion thus took his revenge on East Africans who so often frustrated him. He is the first Olympic champion of Morocco since Hicham El Guerrouj in 2004.
From our special correspondent in Tokyo,
His last two hundred meters left the terrible East African competition in place. Soufiane El Bakkali achieved an unstoppable end of 3,000 meters steeplechase on August 2, 2021, in the final of the Olympic Games. The Moroccan, so often covered with silver and bronze in this particularly painful discipline, was rewarded for his perseverance, on the soggy track of the Olympic Stadium in Tokyo.
He beat the Ethiopian Lamecha Girma (8: 08.90), vice-world champion in the steeplechase, and the Kenyan Benjamin Kigen (8: 10.38). His compatriot Mohamed Tindfout, he finished 13e.
Soufiane El Bakkali thus succeeds his great rival, the Kenyan Conseslus Kipruto, not qualified for Tokyo 2021 on the Olympic list. In the absence of Kipruto, El Bakkali puts an end to the incredible Kenyan domination over the distance, after nine Olympic titles consecutive since 1984.
Successor of Hicham El Guerrouj
Five years after a frustrating fourth place at the Rio Games, Soufiane El Bakkali became the first Moroccan Olympic champion since the legendary Hicham El Guerrouj, author of the double over 1,500 and 5,000 meters in 2004. The runner from Fez is also the sixth representative of the Morocco to climb to the highest step of the podium in the history of the Olympics. The one who had revealed himself in Brazil, had since become vice-world champion in 2017 in London, then bronze medalist at the World Cup in Doha in 2019.
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