The only way to set new standards when it comes to racing is to do it in training as well. The defeat is still frustrating, but it makes it slightly easier when you can rationalise the result. "The other side is that because it's always been my interest to push back the barriers, I like to see those hard work- outs as well So it's a fine line. In part, McDonald blamed himself for the lacklustre performance by Ngeny. His philosophy has always been that training should be as hard, if not harder, than racing, but McDonald believes that Ngeny's final full-out training session before Zurich tipped the balance between fine tuning and exhaustion."The damage can be done so quickly in a training session and it's hard to stop it," McDonald said. That night, the Moroccan broke the world record, but Ngeny's refusal to back down augured well for more prominent contests later in the season. There was a crackling anticipation to the start of the 1,500metres in Zurich last Wednesday, a feeling of revolution comprehensively quelled when the champion left Ngeny trailing with a devastating burst on the final lap.

"Noah could be world record holder at any distance from 1,000 to 5,000m," says McDonald. "I can see him dominating in the same way as El Guerrouj and, before him, Morceli."The more pertinent question for Seville is whether the prodigious Kenyan can match relentless strides with El Guerrouj as he did so memorably and unexpectedly in the mile in Rome. The latest in a distinguished line which stretches back to John Walker and Steve Ovett and now includes Daniel Komen, Moses Kiptanui and Sonia O'Sullivan is Noah Ngeny (pronounced "Nien"), the one runner with a realistic chance of upsetting Hicham El Guerrouj in the 1,500m in Seville. But his record of 16 Olympic medallists and 19 world champions suggests he can tell a champion from a mile away. "I had the mind to be a champion, not the physique," he says. He has his eye on football too. McDonald, by his own admission, wants to broaden his horizons. He has been involved in athletics since running round his home track as a five- year-old.

He beat Seb Coe once, in a cross-country race in Gateshead, and was a solid enough athlete to be champion of the north at 5,000m and of the south at 10,000m. Besides a stable of 100 or so athletes, McDonald has hired Mark Petchey, the former British Davis Cup player, to oversee his growing interests in tennis. At the height of the European season, as many as 50 Kenyan athletes will be based in Teddington, housed, coached and funded by Kim McDonald, whose considerable entrepreneurial skills honed by running his own window cleaning business while a schoolboy in Keighley have now been turned on the cutthroat business of sports management. The local Tesco has seen more world champions and Olympic gold medallists than Crystal Palace and the days when the supplies of brown rice ran out are long gone They know to stock up in the spring. The Kenyans have become part of scenery in this quiet suburb of west London. THE DEER were out in Bushy Park last Friday, grazing peacefully by the fountain. The Kenyans were there too, as familiar a sight to regular passers-by, dressed in distinctive blue and black tracksuits, stretching their long limbs with such easy grace that the mind channelled the images of animal and human into one athletic blur.