Alistair's ready to mix and match (From Ilkley Gazette)

Alistair Brownlee's ready to mix and match

4:00pm Wednesday 8th August 2012 in Sport

Alistair Brownlee could try his luck on the track after producing a phenomenal run to win Olympic gold in the triathlon.

The 24-year-old Bingley Harrier went into the race as the world champion and hot favourite but he was pushed hard by Javier Gomez and needed to produce a brilliant ten-kilometre run split of 29min 7sec to hold off the Spaniard.

That was only 1min 37 sec slower than Mo Farah’s time in winning 10,000 metres gold on Saturday.

The inevitable question is how fast could he run if he had not previously swum 1500m and cycled 43km, and Brownlee is keen to find out, raising the possibility of running on the track in the Commonwealth Games in Glasgow in two years’ time.

He played down the comparisons with Farah, though, and dismissed any hopes of competing in the Olympics in athletics, saying: “You have to run 27min 30sec to qualify for the 10km at the Olympics, which I think is pretty much impossible for me.

“It’s probably a step too far. I was absolutely going as fast as I could for the whole 10km and Mo Farah definitely wasn’t, so I think that’s the difference there.

“I would love to give it a try, especially for Glasgow, where the standard isn’t quite as fast.

“Maybe to give me something a bit different, have a new avenue to go down, and try to do it as well as triathlon.”

Brownlee is certainly not about to give up on triathlon, though, and he is keen to defend his title in Rio de Janeiro in four years’ time.

The Bingley Harrier said: “Four years seems a long time, but it doesn’t seem like four years since Beijing.

“Triathlon has a World Series every year, so it’s a bit of a conveyor belt, then there’s the Commonwealth Games, which is very exciting.

“I’d love to be in Rio two years after that. We just need a course with a hill in Rio please.”