(S.Ravi Seshu)

A few minutes before the 5000 M race on Sunday, the monarch of Track and Field, Usian Bolt, in his casual and jovial mood, came across British great Mo Farah, who was warming up for ‘Double Double.’ Mo is to distance running what Bolt is to sprinting.

The ‘Triple Treble’ hero from Jamaica stopped for a while, hugged Mo, wished him good luck, took a selfie and walked past. Later Mo won the race in style. In deed the meeting of two legends, for all practical purposes, will remain a historic moment in the history of athletics. We are going to miss the two greatest athletes, one an undisputed leader of short distances and the other in long distance races, who are all set to hang their boots after the Olympics in Rio. What a sad news!

As he always would do, Mo relegated himself to the back of all his competitors at the outset and pushed them back 150 meters before the race came to an end. By winning 5,000 M race in 13:03:30, Mo made into record books. He is only the second athlete, after Lasse Viren, to bag the 5,000m and 10,000m at two Olympics games. The Flying Finn achieved the unimaginable feat way back in 1972 and 1976 while Mo repeated it in 2012 and 2016.

The fastest human Bolt won 100m, 200m and 4X100 gold medals in the consecutive three Olympics in Beijing (2008), London (2012) and Rio (2016) throwing a challenge of insurmountable ‘Triple Treble’for the generations to come.

Both the athletes are leaving the field with two post signature gestures. The human race will miss bow-and-arrow pose (indicating his zooming speed) of Bolt and ‘Mobot’ (performing the letter ‘M’ over his head) of Mo Farah. This picture shows the good pals posing the signature of one another during the London Olympics.

That is why, Sunday’s tete-a-tete of the two greatest athlete on the tracks, for the last time, is ‘painfully’ historic.