Add David Rudisha to the list of likely stars at the 2012 Olympic Games

David Rudisha, star of 2012 Olympics?

PARIS — The track at the Beijing Olympics belonged to Usain Bolt.

At the London Games in 2012, he may have to share the glory with David Rudisha.

Bolt, the showman, will always be the bigger star. His events, the 100 and 200, have more glamour, more pulling power than Rudisha’s discipline, the 800.

And Bolt, of course, is already a multiple Olympic champion.

But Rudisha is the Next Big Thing.

The 21-year-old Kenyan proved that not once but twice on consecutive Sundays this August by rewriting the 800-meter world record that had gathered dust since 1997.

Like Bolt, Rudisha is forcing us to reconsider where the boundaries of human possibility lie in his discipline. It is surely only a matter of time until he becomes the first human to complete two circuits of the track in under 1 minute and 41 seconds. He’s only a whisker away now: the ink drying on his shiny new record reads 1:41.01.

The biggest parallel with Bolt is in style. Both men are simply thrilling to watch because of the muscular power when they run, like the smooth pumping of steel pistons in an ocean liner’s boiler room. A consequence of their long, loping and controlled strides is that their rivals look jagged and frenetic in comparison, as if forced to try too hard to keep up.

Perching uncomfortably on the crossroads between sprints and middle distance makes the 800 a monstrously difficult race. Its unique combination of distance and speed taxes both the aerobic and anaerobic systems in the body — essentially its methods for creating energy — to the absolute limit. Runners must be both quick and enduring, powerful but not too heavy — physical qualities that do not always come together and which require very different types of training to hone.

Yet Rudisha, like Bolt in his events, makes it look so laughably easy. The way his manager tells it, he always has.

James Templeton was first alerted to Rudisha by another Kenyan runner, Japheth Kimutai, in an April 2005 phone call.

“I’ll never forget the conversation,” he says. “He said, ‘Oh, JT, oh, you are going to be a happy man.’ … I said, ‘What’s up?’ He said, ‘We’ve found the guy we’ve been looking for.’”

“That day he ran his first 800 and he ran 1:49 on a sluggish dirt track with his long stride. Japheth was well aware then that this kid had greatness in him.”

To truly be considered great, Rudisha now needs gold medals — from the Olympics and world championships — around his neck. As much as these things can be planned, it was smart of Rudisha to brush Wilson Kipketer’s world record out of the way this year so he can focus next year solely on the worlds and, in 2012, the Olympics.

Motivation won’t be a problem. Rudisha flopped at the 2009 worlds, a semifinal victim of inexperience and cold, rainy weather. Before that, a pulled calf muscle kept him from the 2008 Beijing Games.

“It took him a long time to get over that,” Templeton says. But, looking ahead to the coming two years, the manager adds: “In some ways, that disappointment could have worked out for the best.”

At 6-foot-2, Rudisha is taller than previous record holders Kipketer and Sebastian Coe. And his apparently level head should help him cope with the heightened expectations that his world record will generate.

Templeton gives credit to Rudisha’s coach, Colm O’Connell, for his graceful running style.

“He’s always saying, ‘I don’t want to see you thrashing about. You must be fast but controlled,’” he says.

Rudisha turned a corner a year ago in Rieti, Italy, when he ran 1:42.01 in strong gusts, breaking Sammy Koskei’s 25-year-old African record. Afterward, sitting in doping control while flags crackled in the wind outside, Rudisha said to his manager: “I know now I can run 1:40.”

The key to unlocking that uncharted territory could lie on the final bend and finishing straight, what Templeton calls “the hanging-on part” of an 800, when the body is heading for exhaustion. On his record-setting runs, Rudisha blazed those 200 meters in 26.55 and 26.43 seconds but believes he can shave those times down, says Templeton.

On lap 1, “he’s just sort of doing a strong lope. The hard work is on the second lap, where you are digging in,” he says.

“Digging in” doesn’t really do justice to the elegance of Rudisha running at full tilt, his long stride eating up the track. For such a thing of beauty, London 2012 could prove the perfect stage.

John Leicester is an international sports columnist for The Associated Press. Write to him at jleicester(at)ap.org