Ethiopia's Kenenisa Bekele does have rivals, but he does not think Mo Farah is necessarily one of them. That is despite the fact that the two men will compete for the 5,000 metres and the 10,000m titles at the Olympics this summer. Bekele, 29, is the world record holder at both distances, and has won three Olympic gold medals and five world championship titles. From the mountain top he occupies, Farah is a figure somewhere in the foothills, a man only just beginning to prove himself capable of competing at the highest level.

In Bekele's mind it is not just Farah he is trying to beat, but a host of names from the sport's past – Paavo Nurmi, Emile Zatopek, Lasse Viren and Haile Gebrselassie. All four won the Olympic 10,000m title twice, as has Bekele. Now he intends to become the first man to win it three times.

Farah, like so many other men Bekele has raced and beaten in his career, is simply another runner he will have to overtake on his way towards becoming the greatest ever. "History," Bekele says, "has a big place in my heart. It is not easy to achieve three Olympic titles, and it will be great if I can do it. I have been thinking about it a lot." Then, when the London Olympics are over, Bekele says he will switch to marathon running. He plans to break the world record in that event, too.

Bekele says he will run both the 5,000m and the 10,000m in London so long as his form and fitness allow him to. That may yet be a big if. He finished a disappointing seventh in the 3,000m in Doha on Friday night, blaming an injured ankle that had cost him three days of training.

If he does run both then Farah, one of Great Britain's best hopes of a gold in athletics, having won 5,000m gold at last year's world championships and silver in the 10,000m, will at best start as second-favourite in both events. "He is a great athlete in great shape," Bekele says of Farah. "I hope he continues like this. He has a good chance to achieve a good result."

The magnanimity is telling. He is gracious about a man he believes he has the measure of. When he talks about his countryman Gebrselassie, on the other hand, Bekele's eyes and words come alive with the fire of genuine rivalry. He says the two men "never" talk. "We are rivals, so how can we advise each other?"

Even when he beat Gebrselassie at the 2003 world championships, Bekele still did not believe he had made it as a runner. "Because it needs time. For a long time I was thinking: 'Maybe I will win, or maybe not' – it was always 50-50 in my mind." That attitude tells you a little about how he must see Farah, whom he describes as "a competitor, another challenger". After all, Bekele did not lose a single 10,000m track race between 2003 and 2011.

"Results," he says, "are what lead you to the top. I never thought I had got there until I was beating everybody. You can only talk about greatness when you reach that level." Bekele finally did lose a 10,000m race on the track last year, when he pulled out of the world championship final in which Farah went on to take silver. That race would have gone differently, Bekele says, had he only had an extra "two or three weeks" to recover from the calf injury that had been troubling him. Three weeks later he won a 10,000m in Brussels in a world-leading 26min 43.16sec. That time was 25.63 shy of his own world record, but still faster than Farah's personal best.

"Brussels was a very important race to me," Bekele says, "because it gave me the mental confidence to continue." He suffered a succession of serious injuries between 2009and 2011. There were many times, he says, when he thought he would have to quit the sport.

"When I was injured I thought that maybe I couldn't run again," he says. "Many times, I was starting training, but would feel pain and could not recover from training. I was just feeling so down. It was a bad time for me, very difficult."

The love of his family and friends kept him going. "I want to thank the people behind me, especially my wife and my family, but also the doctors and physiotherapists. And also God, it was the will of God that I am running again." He says that he ran too much, worked himself too hard, in the early years, and that is why he is suffering now. He has scaled back his workload and is more sensible about how he manages training. At long last, he says, he feels near the level of fitness that he had when he set his world records.

All that time off allowed Bekele to work on the great project of his life, the development of a new stadium in the town of Saluta, 10km outside the capital Addis Ababa. He first had the idea seven years ago, just after his fiancée Alem Techale died of a heart attack while the two _were out on a training run together. He has since married, but the tragedy sparked thoughts about what he wanted his legacy to be.

"I started dreaming, six, seven years ago, about building a sports camp," Bekele says. "Because in our country there is only one international stadium with a running track, and we need many stadiums, so that is why I started dreaming about doing this myself.

"It is not easy to build it alone. It has been very hard – financially, mentally, it asked a lot of me. Financially especially. It needs more money. I am trying, you know, running away." The stadium and sport centre open in a fortnight. "That," he says, "makes me very happy."

After that, and after his attempt to win a third Olympic gold in the 10,000m, Bekele says he has "one last dream" and that is to take up marathon running.

Does he believe he can break the world record in that event, too? "Of course. I want to try, if I move into marathon, everybody can expect me to try. I always want to run faster than others, that is my goal, and it always has been." And unfortunately for Farah, he usually does.