One of the two distance runners, the one born in Somalia and raised from age eight in west London, will race the Olympics at home. Mohammed (Mo) Farah will circle the track and hear a sound unlike anything he's heard before, initially in the 10,000 meters on the first Saturday night in August and then seven days later in the 5,000. He will feel a nation's passion, sprung not just from patriotic medal lust but from a cultural love of the long run, an affair gone fallow for decades and now revived by this 127-pound wisp of a man with a shaved head and a small tuft of black hair that clings to the point of his chin, like a little climber on the underside of a cliff.
On that Saturday night he will give Great Britain its first real chance at a gold medal in track and field at the London Games, and its first ever in a flat track event longer than 1,500 meters. He will understand what Cathy Freeman felt in Sydney 12 years ago when she won the 400 meters in her home country, sprinting through a torrent of noise. "Of course, Cathy ran for 49 seconds," says retired British triple jumper Jonathan Edwards, who won a gold medal on the same night as Freeman. "Mo will be running for 27 minutes."
The other of the two distance runners, the one who was born in Oregon and lives there still, will race the Olympics far from home. Galen Rupp will circle the track in relative anonymity except to the track fanatics who understand his quest and follow it in corners of the Internet, alternately praising his performances and criticizing the training regimen that produced them. He will be a tall, blond American surrounded mostly by tiny East Africans, and he will be trying—along with Bernard Lagat—to break a U.S. men's Olympic medal drought in the long track events that approaches five decades.
They will shake hands before the start and wish each other luck, because while they seem to share almost nothing, they in fact have shared more than most brothers. Thousands of miles on trails in New Mexico and France. Hundreds of lung-searing interval laps on tracks in Oregon and Utah. A passion for soccer, both on the pitch and on PlayStation. Meals, hotel rooms, plane rides; a hometown, a coach, a goal.