Marathon Organizers Hoping Need for Speed Will Be Met

For a decade, Belayneh Densimo was the standard. His 2 hours 6 minutes 50 seconds at Rotterdam in 1988 was the mark everyone who runs 26 miles, 385 yards shot for . . . and missed.

Until Berlin.

Until Amsterdam.

Until Tokyo.

Until Chicago.

In the last 18 months, seven athletes in five races at those four venues have run faster than Densimo’s 2:06:50, which had stood so long as the world record, and two of the three fastest times came in the same race last fall in Chicago.

Khalid Khannouchi of Morocco ran 2:05.42, and nobody has run faster. Moses Tanui ran 2:06.16, finishing second with the third-best time in history. Simon Bor ran 2:09.25 and finished fifth.

That brings us to the 15th Los Angeles Marathon, which will be run Sunday, the question being how fast it will be run.

Bill Orr, new at recruiting elite marathon runners, talked with agents and coaches all over the world, seeking one or more of the Magnificent Seven for Los Angeles, getting none. He got a men’s field that, he hopes, runs fast and a women’s field that would have to surprise many to do so.

The runners’ incomes largely depend on how fast they run.

To some extent, so does the race’s future.

“In the past, we’ve paid bonuses based on finishes: first, second, third,” said Marie Patrick, the race’s executive vice president. “This year, there are no place bonuses. We’re concentrating on time.”

Bill Burke, the race’s president, always has been fixated on time. His quest was a 2:10 marathon, which Bor gave him last year when he broke the race record by 54 seconds in 2:09:25.

Burke formerly handled the elite athlete work, but this year ceded it to Patrick. Patrick, who is more attuned to the back-of-the-lead-pack citizen runners, 20,000 of whom will line up in one of the world’s largest races, hired Orr, replacing Anne Roberts, who also recruited runners for the New York Marathon.

“Nothing against Anne,” Patrick said, “we just wanted our own guy.”

They got six Kenyans as the top-seeded runners, and none of them has run faster than Bor.

“I think it’s a very good field,” said Orr, a Florida insurance salesman who had worked with shorter-distance races there. “There are some very good athletes.

“I wanted to get a good, competitive field . . . for a good, compact lead pack.”

Whether he did remains to be seen.

Top-seeded Bor, Peter Ndirangu, Christopher Cheboiboch, Jonathan Ndambuki and Mark Yatich are the best. Whether they impress the race’s sponsors and television audience is another question.

Bor wasn’t hard to recruit. After crossing the finish line last year, earning $60,000 and a car, he told Burke he would be back.

“I think I could have run faster, but I found the race was marked in miles,” he said. “In Kenya [and most other places], the race is in kilometers. When I was running, I didn’t know how far I was from the finish.”

As with most runners, he wore a watch, but translating times and miles into kilometers was too much.

His coach, Dr. Gabriela Rosa, understood the distance and sat in the media room, watching the big television screen and muttering for Bor to slow down. Instead, his protege sped up and won the race by more than a minute over countryman James Bungei.

Cheboiboch was third, defeated, he said, by a mosquito.

“I had trained very hard for three months for Los Angeles,” Cheboiboch said. “Then, two weeks before the race, I came down with malaria. I said, ‘Wow,’ but I had trained so long that there was no way I wasn’t going to run.”

The malaria is gone, and Cheboiboch has run 2:10:54 as a best time. He said he can do better.

Between Bor and Cheboiboch is Ndirangu, a Kenyan soldier who ran 2:08:46 in finishing third in Chicago in 1998.

The women’s field, even thinner than the men’s, will be chasing Jane Salumae, an Estonian who has trained in San Diego for two months. She has run a 2:27:04 marathon and has figured out why her right heel hurt so much that she couldn’t race last year.

“One of my legs was longer than the other,” she said.

The discovery was made by a German doctor, who prescribed a built-up shoe, and she took off again with an eye to improving her best time, winning in Turin, Italy, three years ago.

If she is caught, it probably will be by Albina Galliamova, a Russian who has run 2:30.08 and who has been training in New Mexico.

The focus, as always, will be on the elite field that defines the race beyond Southern California.

“They’re what the sponsors and the television are buying,” Burke said. “If we don’t keep up [the elite field], the other 20,000 don’t have a place to run.”

If a thin field translates into a fast field, everybody’s buying. If it’s just a thin field, it’s a harder sell.

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L.A. Marathon

* When: 8:45 a.m. Sunday.

* Bike tour: 6 a.m.

* Wheelchair: 8:20.

* Start: 6th Street and Figueroa, downtown Los Angeles.

* Finish: Flower Street, north of 5th Street in front of Arco Plaza.

* TV: Channel 13, 8 a.m.

* Additional coverage: B1