Canada's Marco Arop met his middle-distance hero — now, he wants to surpass him

There's that old adage, never meet your heroes. 

Except when Canadian middle-distance runner Marco Arop actually did, it was everything he could have imagined. And maybe more. 

Last August in Budapest, after Arop's breakthrough performance to become the first Canadian to win world championship 800-metre gold, the Edmonton runner was getting ready for the medal ceremony. 

He could have never prepared himself for what happened next. There he was, David Rudisha, presenting Arop his gold medal.

"I don't usually get star-struck but seeing him there, realizing how massive he has been in my journey, I had so many thoughts and so many questions," Arop told CBC Sports.

Now, Arop has his eyes set on breaking Rudisha's 800 world record, a pursuit that continues in earnest at the first Diamond League event in China this Saturday.

WATCH | Arop captures world championship gold in men's 800:

To understand the significance and weight of that experience for Arop, meeting Rudisha for the first time, you have to rewind to 11 years earlier. 

Arop was starting to get serious about his running career — a somewhat later start, as he was already in Grade 12 and had been playing basketball, but he wanted to see where running might be able to take him. 

Arop says he turned to YouTube to look up how to run the perfect 800, and it made sense to him that if he was going to try to become the best, he should probably start watching footage from the greatest 800-metre race in the history of the sport. 

That just happens to be the 2012 Olympic final in London. Rudisha, a Kenyan middle-distance runner, had set the world record in the distance two years prior to those Games.

His 6-foot-two-inch frame powered out of the blocks, and like he had so many times throughout his career, Rudisha blasted to the front. He led from start to finish in what still is the fastest Olympic final ever in the event.

Rudisha broke his own world record that night with a time of one minute 40.91 seconds to become Olympic champion. And seven out of the eight runners in that race all set personal-best times. There were three national records broken — every finishing time was the fastest recorded for each placing and it marked the first time all eight athletes ran under 1:44 in the same race.

Arop has watched that race countless times and still marvels at Rudisha and all the other runners when he thinks about it today. It became the blueprint of how Arop was going to run the race.