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Bernard Lagat's latest Nike TV commercial pictures him holding running shoes.

"I run very fast,'' he says. "Very, very fast. I don't need these shoes. Maybe you do.''

Lagat throws the shoes over his shoulder, turns and sprints down a road.

The Road to the Beijing Olympics, perhaps?

The Road to Wealth and Fame?

The Road to Happiness?

In 2007, there was no fork in the road for Bernard "Kip" Lagat. He ran straight and true (and very, very fast) until he arrived in track and field history. He became the first man, living or dead, to win world championships in the 1,500- and 5,000-meter races in the same year.

He is the Star's 2007 Tucson sports figure of the year.

In the months since Lagat won his unprecedented championships in Osaka, Japan, he has raced before adoring crowds of 40,000 on the European circuit, gone home to visit his family in Kapsabet, Kenya, traveled around the country to represent Nike at high school running seminars, celebrated his 33rd birthday, and even gone back to his alma mater, Washington State, where the mayor of Pullman, Wash., proclaimed it "Bernard Lagat Day.''

A few days after Christmas, holding his 2-year-old son, Miika, Lagat said his stay on "cloud nine'' was enduring. "Not until November,'' he said, "did it fully hit me what I had done."

The European and African running icon has become a global figure, recognized while walking with his wife, Gladys, on the Las Vegas Strip, and recognized while shopping for groceries on Tucson's East Side.

"I heard my name at Safeway and I said, 'Who is calling me?' I turned and a man said, 'It is Lagat.' "

Bernard Kipchirchir Lagat is the fifth of 10 children born to a Kenyan farmer. In 1996, after being recruited to WSU by James Li, who now is Arizona's cross country coach and the head manager of the USA Olympic Track and Field team, Lagat earned two WSU degrees, in management information systems and science econometrics.

He has not had to put his college degrees to work because he earns in excess of $1 million annually as the world's leading middle-distance runner and his sport's most recognized face and personality.

"I think Kip's fame from Osaka just magnified his personality, but it hasn't changed him,'' said Li, who is his coach and strategist. "In track circles, he is known as very friendly and easygoing."

Indeed, Lagat's ever-present smile could light up a cellar.

In a May 2004 ceremony in downtown Tucson, Lagat became an American citizen. At that instant, he became this country's best hope to win an Olympic gold medal in the metric mile (1,500 meters) since Mel Sheppard in 1908.

At his athletic prime, Lagat fully understands that the '08 Beijing Olympics will be his last best chance to win a gold medal. He was a silver medalist, second to the great Hicham El Guerrouj, at the 2004 Athens Olympics. In the 2000 Sydney Olympics, Lagat was a bronze medalist.

"I feel 2008 will be the year,'' he said. "I need to get that gold medal. Every time I train, my mind is on the gold medal. My mother reminds me that I have a bronze and a silver and that next is the gold. That is what drives me.

"Some runners train with money as motivation. I will not do that. I run to win, not to win money."

America's greatest milers, Jim Ryun in 1968 and Glenn Cunningham in 1936, were limited to Olympic silver medals in the 1,500. It is a distance dominated by Africans, a four-decade dynasty that began with Kenyan Kip Keino in 1968.

With Lagat now running as an American, and with the emergence of 24-year-old Alan Webb as a potential Olympic medalist — Webb beat Lagat at the USA championships this summer — it can be said for the first time in 30 or 40 years that the mile has made a comeback in America.

That stands to be Lagat's legacy: He ushered American middle-distance running back to world prominence.

Lagat lives about six months of the year at his four-bedroom home on Tucson's East Side. His brother, two-time NCAA champion distance runner Robert Cheseret, lives near Benson. Two more siblings live in Tucson and often occupy Lagat's gated-community home while he trains in Flagstaff, and runs internationally while based in Tubingen, Germany.

"I have already begun full-time training for the (Olympic) trials in June,'' he said. "I need to live up to my own expectations — to be the gold medalist at 1,500 meters in Beijing. I feel an urgency. Now is my time.''