Justin Lagat wrote this column about gender-based violence, which is not only happening in Kenya. Justin writes about athletics in Kenya and their aim to create awareness of the crisis.
Over the past 20 years or so, through the eyes of a Kenyan male runner, sports journalist and coach, I have observed that Kenyan women are slowly beginning to surpass their male counterparts in winning major world championships.
In the past few years since 2008, Kenyan female stars have started to rise rapidly compared to their male counterparts. Before long, they are racking up more medals at the Olympics and World Championships.
At the recent Paris Olympics, Kenya won four gold medals, three for women and only one for men. By contrast, Kenyan men are the only men to have won gold medals at the Olympics since 1968, before Pamela Jellimo and Nancy Langat finally opened the door for them at the Beijing 2008 Olympics.
There was a similar scenario at the World Athletics Championship. The opposite of what happened in Rome in 1987 happened at last year’s World Championships in Budapest, where the Kenyan women won three gold medals and the men none.
When you’re the best in the world, it’s hard to improve because you have no one to learn from and emulate. While Kenyan men have always been on top of the world with their running and seen no one to catch up with them, their female counterparts have always tried to catch up with them every day in their regular workouts.
In Kenya, if an elite female runner does not have a male pacer during training, you will often find them training in a men’s group.
With stiff competition in the world of men’s running, many Kenyan male runners are happy to help their training group members become better runners by making them faster in their training and races. It could have been due or just out of goodwill.
In 2007, I signed up to run the 10K in the Nairobi Marathon event. A lady at our training camp was always trailing me during our Tempo runs and Coach Eric Kimaiyo noticed this and had me walk her through some of the workouts. I found out that he also signed up for the same event. I volunteered to let him run the race and only pay for my registration and transportation if he finished first overall. Well, he finished first in great time and brought me a pot full of honey back at camp as a thank you as he waited to be paid.
By the time I was at Iten around 2011, pacing for women was a full-time job for the male runners at some of the camps there.
Well, this arrangement where men sacrifice their careers to support women and later feel entitled to their success may be one of the contributing factors to the rise of gender-based violence in the Kenyan sports community.
Athletics Kenya and Kenya’s Ministry of Sports are currently running a nationwide awareness campaign to combat gender-based violence, which has been on the rise since the murders of Agnes Tirop in 2021 and Uganda’s Rebecca Cheptege this year.
