Do we like Haile Gebrselassie?
Our score: 7 out of 10. A well-liked sporting great with no harmful words about LGBTQ+ people, women or the planet found, marked down for his 2021 war pledge.
Haile Gebrselassie is one of the great distance runners, an Olympic champion who held 27 long-distance records, according to Reuters. Off the track he built a business empire, running more than a dozen companies in hospitality, real estate, agriculture and education. In Ethiopia he's about as close to a national treasure as it gets.
He took on sporting politics too. He became president of the Ethiopian Athletics Federation and quit after two years in November 2018, calling it a “sacrifice”. The trigger was growing complaints from local athletes about facilities and decision-making, which he believed were politically motivated. Derartu Tulu took over.
The messy one is the 2019 stoush with British star Mo Farah. Farah said thieves broke into his locked suitcase at Gebrselassie's hotel near Addis Ababa and that Gebrselassie ignored his calls for help. Gebrselassie denied it, calling the claim an “act of blackmailing and accusation”, and said police found nothing. He countered with allegations about Farah's conduct, which Farah's camp disputed. It's a he-said, he-said that nobody has settled.
The harm check is where it gets complicated. In November 2021, during the Tigray war, he told Reuters he would join the fight against rebel forces. He said: “What would you do when the existence of a country is at stake?” Where you land depends on whether you read it as a patriot rallying behind his government or as a famous face lending weight to a war that displaced millions. We found no reporting that he went to the front, and no slurs from him.
We went looking for anything he's said about LGBTQ+ people, women or the climate and came up empty. That's honestly the whole list, so we can't call it a pass with distinction. We also found no evidence of him platforming conspiracy theories or hate figures.
On the legal front, he led a group of plaintiffs in a 2024 civil suit against the Ethiopian Olympic Committee's president and other senior members. They alleged the defendants ignored a court-ordered freeze on the committee's bank accounts. The Federal High Court rejected the defendants' appeal and kept the injunction in place. We couldn't find a final outcome.