KEY POINTS:
Vanquished 10,000M runner Kimberley Smith has a long-term vision - long being the operative term.
Smith was well beaten into ninth in the early hours of yesterday morning as Ethiopian Tirunesh Dibaba ran the second fastest 10,000m of all time to win gold.
The fast time has sapped the energy from Smith and she will almost certainly bypass the 5000m, the heats of which are on Tuesday night.
Instead, Smith has an eye already to the future and that involves racing over 42km. "I'm going to run a marathon in November," Smith said. Not just any marathon, mind - the New York Marathon. "We'll see how that goes. I might be a marathon runner next time around so I need to start practising a bit."
There seems little point in Smith running the 5000m, something she hinted at after the race, having seen all the energy sapped from her in a race that finished in 29m 54.66s. That puts it second in the all-time list behind only Wang Junxia's discredited 29m 31.78, a time controversial Chinese coach Ma Junren claims was powered by the fungus Cordyceps sinensis.
Nobody will suggest the same was true of Dibaba, another in the production line of terrrific east African atheletes.
"It was a ridiculous race. It was really fast and pretty disappointing," Smith said. "I went out really fast and kind of died. I feel disappointed. The bronze medal was up for grabs."
The bronze was taken by American Shalene Flanagan, who raced smartly to finish strongly in third. It was Flanagan and Smith who set the two fastest pre-Olympic times of the year in May when they went toe-to-toe at Palo Alto. Flanagan's 30m 22.22s easily beat her personal best but Smith's 30m 51s was more than 16s outside hers.
Smith was, in fact, the only runner in the top 13 not to set either a season's or personal best.
The fact was she was not expecting such a hot pace and didn't know how to respond.
"It was a completely different race from last year in Osaka [at the world championships] when I was fifth. That was a really, really slow race until 3km to go when it started to pick up."
