Stories are told of a sign on the access road to Bekoji in central Ethiopia: “Welcome to the village of athletes.” Today, one of its inhabitants completed Bekoji’s sweep of the men’s and women’s gold medals in the two distance races, 5000m and 10,000m.

Tonight, Kenenisa Bekele clinched the distance double by, again, setting an Olympic record in the 5000m — 12:57.82, about twenty seconds short of his own world record. Distance races have a romance not present in the off-you-go-and-don’t-look-back sprints, they require strategy and outplaying the competition on tactics of how to pace oneself and when to go for the finishing kick. They also breed stories of character and team-play, with pace-makers taking the responsibility to get their mate fastest to the finish line.

So it was here at Beijing, with Bekele’s brother, Tariku, and another Ethiopian runner, Abreham Cherkos, pacing the pack to set it up nicely for Bekele.

Sometimes it works the other way. A lone individual can survive the designs of a team of runners, as Morocco’s Hicham El Guerrouj did at Athens to take gold in the 5000m. In Beijing, Bekele had already won gold in the 10,000m last Sunday. And this week, on Friday, another runner from Bekoji, Tirunesh Dibaba, took gold in the 5000m to complete her double, having won the 10,000m on August 15.

The Ethiopian and Kenyan women are now so dominant in distance running that it is easy to forget that it was just in 1992 that Derartu Tulu, who is related to Dibaba, took gold in the 10,000m to become the first African woman to win a medal at the Olympics.

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