0.06 of a second?
Which is the margin by which Frenchman Jimmy Gressier wins the 10,000m after a storming finish.
Or 0.03 of a second?
Which is what happens in the men’s marathon, where after two-plus hours of running two men hit the tape at the same time. So the winner is decided by a photo finish.
Or two hours, 27 minutes and 23 seconds?
Which is the marathon finishing time achieved by an unheralded young woman from Uruguay, a timing so profound that it leaves a young man from Flagstaff, Arizona in tears on a bus in Tokyo.
Only sport does this every day. Only sport can in a single moment rewrite the trajectory of a career, emotionally drain a coach, and turn an athlete from anonymous competitor to international headline.
The runner from Uruguay, a country without a single world athletics championship medal, is Julia Paternain. The coach from Flagstaff is Jack Polerecky, 29, who sets a series of goals with her before the race.
“Our ‘C’ goal was top half of the field,” he tells The Straits Times from Tokyo. “Our ‘B’ goal was top 20. Our ‘A’ goal was top eight. Top three was not even in our conversation.”
And then on Sept 14, Paternain wins bronze and it’s such a stunning moment that she asks an official if this is indeed the finish line. If, in fact, she has really come third. If, dear god, she has somehow achieved something beyond even her imagination.
“I was terrified that wasn’t the finish,” Paternain says. “I still thought maybe there was another 400 metres to go. I could not believe it.”
Bronze medallist Uruguay's athlete Julia Paternain celebrates on the podium for the women's marathon final during the World Athletics Championships in Tokyo on Sept 14. PHOTO: AFP
All day Polerecky, who started working with Paternain in 2024, is out on the course, organising bottles for her. Mostly he can’t see her progress and gets updates on his phone from his wife, Dani, who is watching on TV in Arizona, and fellow coach James McKirdy.
She’s 30th, then 10th, then fifth, then third.
“I can’t believe that,” he says. “Holy (he politely doesn’t complete the thought)... she’s going to medal. That was surreal.”
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In practice, he says, Paternain has “the right mix of fearlessness and composure. She’s always willing to push herself to pretty extreme places but does it in a way that’s smart and makes sense”.
This is the complex thrill of distance running in a world that prefers to swoon over sprinters. “The fastest human on the planet” is a sexy, swaggering sobriquet. The gun goes off and they come out of the blocks like a bullet rifling down a barrel. Yet, as Soh Rui Yong, Singapore’s premier long-distance man, laughs over text, “the 100m is a Michael Bay Transformers movie; 10,000m is Inception”.
He’s not wrong, for Inception is a long, thoughtful heist film and these long races are also well-planned robberies of a sort. You steal gold using intelligence and endurance, resilience and nerve, tactics and moxie.
Runners start in a bunch and then stretch out like a multi-sneakered snake, all striding at striking speeds which television can’t translate. Plots are being hatched, mistakes corrected, legs moving like oiled pistons, stoic faces telling no story of the hard work the lungs are doing.
Tension ticks, laps are counted down. Like a book, races have chapters. No one wants to lead, for Soh says “it’s very stressful to have all your competitors tracking your every move, without knowing how they’re looking. When you’re behind you can just relax and follow and time your attack. Hunter versus hunted”.
The “attack” is the concluding act of great theatre. When it comes, no one is certain. If runners had fuel gauges they’d be flickering on empty, yet there’s always a reserve to turn exhausted legs into a sprint. Yearning, ambition, hunger – all these things we prize are found here, in these last miles for the marathoner and these final strides for the 10,000m runner.
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Paternain does not speak Japanese, she can’t understand what spectators might be telling her, of where she stands in the field, so she just ploughs on. She’s 25, from a land of only 3.5 million people which leans towards football, and she’s telling us a valuable story.
Doesn’t matter the size of the nation. Doesn’t matter if they have no history of running. Doesn’t matter if the field is thick with talent. Doesn’t matter if this is only your second marathon. Doesn’t matter because this is sport, and nothing is promised to anyone, and only if you push hard do doors open to dreams.
It’s this spirit of Paternain which moves Polerecky. In Tokyo he can’t get back to the stadium for the finish and so he watches the end of the marathon on the phone of another coach while in a bus. And he’s “freaking out, cheering and crying”, for what he’s seen before is now something he’s suddenly part of. The miraculous power of sport to alter a life.
