ground
If record-breaking versatility equals greatness, Paul Tergat has ascended into the stratosphere reserved for distance running’s true immortals.
In the space of less than two years, the Kenyan has waltzed to a world record in the 10 000m and won the world cross-country championship for a record fourth consecutive time. Toss in a world best for the half- marathon on the road and it is obvious why Tergat deserves a place in distance running’s hall of fame, alongside the likes of Emil Zatopek, Ron Clarke and Haile Gebrselassie.
In Marrakesh last year, Tergat matched the achievement of countryman John Ngugi when he became the second man in history to win the world cross-country title four times. He will be the favourite to make it five at the 1999 cross-country championships in Belfast this weekend.
Tergat is so magical across country that he appears able to float over muddy fields, while others look as if their feet are stuck in treacle. Even in a nation dripping with wondrous runners, he is known as “Prince Paul” to his compatriots.
“The world cross-country is the toughest race there is at championship level,” Tergat says. “You’re racing against everyone from 3 000m men to marathon runners. To win it just once is very difficult – to do it three or four years in a row is even more so.”
Yet, you somehow feel that outside Kenya Tergat still has to receive the praise he truly deserves for his achievements. The athletics world has grown accustomed to Kenyans setting the pace. No one is astonished any more at seeing a procession of them straining towards the finishing line.
But Tergat, whose regular training route takes him past the house of the Danish author Karen Blixen, on whom the film Out of Africa was based, claims it is persuasive mythology that Kenyan prowess is a consequence of life at altitude, simple food, a lifestyle without the motor car and children who cover as much as 32km daily to and from school.
“Every time you read papers and magazines, that’s what people say, but it is a myth about kids running many kilometres to school.
“In my case, home to school was just 800m. In fact, I didn’t even like running at school and I wasn’t particularly good at it. It was only when I went into the armed forces and I was made to run that I discovered I had a talent for it.”
These preconceptions often arise because Kenyan runners are not usually comfortable with the media attention they attract. Kenyan responses, though inevitably polite, are usually thin on detail. Kenyan athletes often turn up, earn their money and go. They baffle us with their ability and engaging mixture of pride, shyness and 24-carat modesty.
We never know most of them as personalities. It would be unfair to generalise about them on the basis of some memorably monosyllabic encounters with the likes of Ngugi and Douglas Wakiihuri. The 29-year-old Tergat is more at home with the press and does his best to alter a few stereotypes.
He is articulate in banishing the preconceived ideas most people in the West associate with Kenyan running. Tergat also breaks the mould among his countrymen because, while most of his team-mates come from the Eldoret region – a patchwork of thatched huts, vegetable plots and yellow- green maize fields – he is the only international to hail from Kararnet, an industrialised farming town of some 100 000 people. His father, who worked for the government, even owned a car while his children were growing up.
Tergat is based in Italy when he is in Europe. He earns a six-figure salary and has invested it wisely, having set up an import and export business in farming equipment and cars. Many of his colleagues are less fortunate.
“Lots of Kenyan runners are seduced by the great sums of money they believe they can earn,” he says. “Sadly many of them never earn the money they believe is possible because unscrupulous agents in Europe and America take advantage of them.”
Like all great athletes, the ease with which Tergat appears to run is deceptive. There is no mystique. Hard training – more intense than any Westerner would contemplate – is the Kenyan secret, he insists.
“You believe Kenyan training sessions are impossible, but without trying, it has no meaning. No matter how far, how hard – you must do it with your whole mind, your whole heart, and then everything is possible. Winning is ultimately in the mind.”
With the right attitude and training, he insists, the rest of the world is capable of what he and his countrymen have achieved.
“We are all human. No man has two hearts,” he says. “But we train so hard. To be able to sustain that kind of pace, it has to be consistent training – very, very hard, and combined with good food. It is not easy.
“No nation trains as hard as Kenya. Natural talent is not enough. To achieve something in sport, as in life, you have to work hard every day.”