Soon, Jama Aden’s family, currently in Sheffield, will join him in Doha, where he is engaged in the job he took over last year of coaching Qatar’s middle distance runners.

He is looking forward to that. But before the family reunion another important event is looming for this Somali-born Olympian, who in 2008 was voted the International Association of Athletics Federation’s (IAAF) middle distance coach of the year after guiding Sudanese athletes Abubaker Kaki and Ismail Ahmed Ismail to the world indoor 800 metres title and Olympic 800m silver medal respectively.

Doha will host the IAAF’s World Indoor Championships next weekend, and Aden will have a new group of athletes to guide and prompt in the spectacularly well-appointed environ of the Aspire Dome.

I was in Doha for the week which ended with the Championship’s Test Event on February 26 and saw how the finishing touches were being made to a sporting venue that even capacious indoor arenas such as the one in Birmingham appear cramped in comparison.

The Dome forms an embodiment of Qatar’s sporting ambitions, and will surely impress those ambitions upon all who attend next weekend’s event. Beyond the athletics arena lies a swimming pool, a gym, accommodation for the venue’s many sporting students and a full-sized artificial football pitch with seating for 5,000.

It falls to Aden to match this level of aspiration with results on the track, and while some of his more experienced athletes were otherwise engaged with competition in Tehran he was trackside in at the Dome to watch more junior talents play their part in a Test Event that involved competitors from nations including Qatar, Bahrain, Syria, Iraq and Sudan.

The day before this small-scale competition got underway, Aden had addressed an audience of international journalists on the topic of how to help create a champion.

The tightening of rules around change of nationality - in the wake of the controversy stirred by the "adoption" of a number of established African runners by nations in the Arab region - has now shifted the emphasis towards recruitment of young talent for countries such as Qatar. And Aden, whose own life was changed through athletics when he left his native Somalia to take up a sporting scholarship at a Canadian college when he was 17, is a widely admired judge of promising new runners.

Aden, whose ability to communicate with a wide range of athletes is complemented by his command of three languages, believes it is possible to spot a potential athlete just by watching the way the walk down the street. There is something about the fluidity and balance of movement in such individuals that announces itself in even the most mundane of circumstances - if you have the eye to see it.

One of Aden’s other convictions is that coaches should not impose themselves too heavily upon their athlete’s ambitions.

He recalled a conversation he had with Kaki (pictured), who became the youngest World Indoor 800m champion when he won gold in Valencia in 2008 at the age of 18.

"I asked him, 'What is your goal?'," Aden said. "He just said: ‘You are the coach. You tell me.’ But I said, ‘No, you tell me, what is your goal?’

"It is no good starting to run and then saying you want to win the Olympic title - the goal has to be realistic. But you have to decide it yourself. It is no good the coach telling you, because if he tells you, it can freeze you up. And you fail to reach the goal, it is a problem between you."

Taking the subject of his talk very literally, one of the assembled scribes asked Aden why he thought Ismail Ahmed Ismail had failed to win gold in Beijing, where he was beaten to the line by Kenya’s Wilfred Bungei.

Aden responded by pointing out that when athletes get to an Olympic Games or a World Championship, even very small variations in their normal routine can make the difference between them running at their best or just shy of their best.

"Maybe it can be such a small thing as discovering that there is a great place available to eat burgers and fries," he said with a smile. "Even a little detail like that can alter how an athlete performs."

At one point there was a possibility that Aden’s talents might be employed to benefit UK middle distance runners. That possibility was effectively superseded by the offer to coach in a country which was prepared to pay handsomely to ensure it secured its targeted talent.

For Aden, who was used to conducting training sessions in Sudan in the most basic of venues, with athletes, for instance, having to use heavy stones for weight training and in many cases relying on just one pair of shoes throughout a season, the facilities which his new employers in this oil-rich nation provide must seem the stuff of dreams.

If he can utilise his knowledge of human strengths and weaknesses within this dazzling technological environment, Qatar’s sporting ambitions on the track are likely to be realised sooner rather than later.

Mike Rowbottom, one of Britain's most talented sportswriters, has covered the last five Summer and four Winter Olympics for The Independent. Previously he has worked for the Daily Mail, The Times, The Observer, the Sunday Correspondent and The Guardian. He is now chief feature writer for insidethegames.