Career
Dibaba's first fully international outdoor track event was the 2001 IAAF World Cross Country Championships. Running at the age of 15 in women's junior race, she finished 5th. She won the 5000 m silver medal at the 2003 Afro-Asian Games.
Dibaba had great success in the world championships athletics events of 2003, 2005 and 2007. In 2003, Dibaba won the 5000 m in a sprint finish against Marta Dominguez of Spain and Edith Masai of Kenya. She became the youngest athlete ever to win an individual gold medal at the World Championships. So little was known about her that during this race British commentators Steve Cram and Brendan Foster failed to mention her name even once until the final 100 metres. At the 2005 championships, Dibaba produced a blistering finish to out-sprint compatriot Berhane Adere and her own sister Ejegayehu and also became the first woman to win the 10,000/5,000 m double at the same championships. In 2007, when the championships were held in Osaka, Dibaba again utilised her sprint finish to overhaul Turkey's Elvan Abeylegesse despite a tumble that happened mid-race and having abdominal pains throughout the race. She became the only woman to win back-to-back 10,000 m titles. In Osaka, Dibaba won with a time of 31:55.41.
At the 2004 Olympics in Athens, Dibaba was beaten into third place by Meseret Defar of Ethiopia and Isabella Ochichi of Kenya in 5000 m event. The result was considered by some to be a disappointment but at 19, she still became the youngest ever medalist for Ethiopia at the Olympics.
In 2006 she won five out of six Golden League events (5000 m) in the same season, which earned her a total of $83,333.
Dibaba is also a remarkably successful cross country runner; she has five IAAF World Cross Country Championships victories, including one junior title (Lausanne, 2003), one short course title (Saint-Galmier, 2005), and two long course titles (Saint-Galmier, 2005, and Fukuoka, 2006). From 2007, there was just one race in each category. Dibaba won the silver in the women's race at Mombasa in 2007 and the gold at Edinburgh in 2008.
Dibaba is known to have an on-track rivalry with Meseret Defar, and races featuring the two are highly anticipated, but rare, usually only occurring at championships.
A major feature of Dibaba's running style is an incredible sprint finish. During the final lap of the 10,000 m in 2005, Dibaba was clocked over the closing 400 m in 58.33 seconds.
Read more about this topic: Tirunesh Dibaba
Famous quotes containing the word career:
“I restore myself when I’m alone. A career is born in public—talent in privacy.”
—Marilyn Monroe (1926–1962)
“Clearly, society has a tremendous stake in insisting on a woman’s natural fitness for the career of mother: the alternatives are all too expensive.”
—Ann Oakley (b. 1944)
“He was at a starting point which makes many a man’s career a fine subject for betting, if there were any gentlemen given to that amusement who could appreciate the complicated probabilities of an arduous purpose, with all the possible thwartings and furtherings of circumstance, all the niceties of inward balance, by which a man swings and makes his point or else is carried headlong.”
—George Eliot [Mary Ann (or Marian)