Duncan Mackay : Athletics
When Tegla Loroupe returned to Kenya after winning the New York City Marathon in 1994, a party was organised and the villagers presented her parents with nine cattle, 16 sheep and some land.
Yet it was the words of the women in her tribe she still values the most. “You did a good job,” they told her. “You showed that we are like the men, we can do things. We are not useless.”
Male athletes have made Kenya synonymous with success in long-distance running, but women are discouraged from competing beyond the age of 16, when they are expected to start a family.
“Most people in Kenya think woman are supposed to stay home and care for the kids,” said Sammy Nyangincha, one of Kenya’s top male runners. “They think that if a woman goes out of the country, she will be spoiled, that she will learn more than the others, and that when they tell her to do something, she will say no.”
Loroupe (25) recalls her early running days and the discouragement she received from others. “When I ran in school, the men in my tribe said, ‘Tegla, you’re wasting your time,'” she said. “They didn’t want me to do sports. But God has given me a plan. Man cannot close my door.”
Loroupe completed another stage of her master plan in the Rotterdam race on April 19 when she set a world record for the marathon of 2:20:47, taking 19 seconds off the record the Norwegian Ingrid Kristiansen set in 1985.
Her next outing over 42km will be New York, where she also won in 1995, on November 1.
At 1,5m and just more than 38kg, and with feet so tiny that even children’s running shoes are too big for her, Loroupe is the smallest world-class marathon runner – and probably the toughest.
One of seven children from a town called Kapenguria on the Ugandan border, about 640km from Nairobi, Loroupe began running for the same reason most Kenyan youngsters do: to avoid being late for school. “If you were late they beat you,” she said.
Loroupe’s was a traditional family and her parents took a long time to be convinced their daughter was not wasting her life. They wanted her to stay at home and look after her younger sisters and brother, even forsaking school. Now they are happy. “We are the richest family in the village,” said a proud Loroupe.
She is a member of the Bokot tribe, nomads who once drove their cattle across the plains of Kenya. Now, they graze them on ranches like the one Loroupe grew up on. As a child, speed work came second to ranch work. “It was good training for me,” she said. “I often used to chase the cattle herd for up to 20km. I didn’t know I was training.”
However, the more she ran, the more distance she put between herself and the expectations of her society, and she had to travel abroad for opportunities. She now lives in Germany, where she shares a house with Tanzanian and Ethiopian male runners as well as Kenyans.
“At first they thought I was there to cook and clean up after them, but I refused and now they are very supportive of my efforts,” said Loroupe.
Loroupe finds life in the spotlight difficult, though she softens its glare with a captivating smile. She is a woman of such disarming diffidence that it took her two years – and two victories – to tell New York officials that they were misspelling her first name.
In a recent race in Rotterdam, just as she did in New York, Loroupe showed the confidence, restraint and endurance to run the second half of the marathon faster than the first.
As a woman in Kenya, she knows the meaning of the words patience and strength. Especially strength.