by Justin Lagat
Justin Lagat wrote this column on Gender-Based Violence, which is not happening just in Kenya. Justin is writing about Athletics Kenya and their goal of creating awareness of the crisis.
Over the last 20 years or so, from the eyes of a Kenyan male runner, a sports journalist, and a coach, I have observed Kenyan women slowly begin to overtake their male counterparts in winning major global championships.
In the last few years, since around 2008, Kenya’s female stars have started to rise rapidly compared to their male stars. Before long, they have been reaping more medals at the Olympics and World Championships.
At the recent Paris Olympics, Kenya won four gold medals, three of them from women and only one from a man. In contrast, Kenyan men have been the only ones winning gold medals at the Olympics since 1968, before Pamela Jelimo and Nancy Langat finally opened the doors for them at the Beijing 2008 Olympics.
It has been a similar scenario at the World Athletics Championships. The opposite of what happened in 1987 in Rome happened last year at the Budapest World Championships, where Kenyan women won three gold medals, and the men won none.
When you are the best in the world, it is hard to improve because you have no one to study and emulate. While the Kenyan men have always been on top of the world with their running and saw no one else to catch up with, their female counterparts have always tried to catch up with them daily in their usual training workouts.
In Kenya, if an elite woman runner doesn’t have personal male pace setters in training, you often find them training within a men’s group.
With the hard competition in the men’s world of running, most male runners in Kenya are happy to help their female training group members become better runners by pacing them in their training and racing. It could have been arranged or just out of goodwill.
In 2007, I registered to run the 10K at the Nairobi Marathon event. A lady at our training camp would always stick with me in our Tempo Runs, and Coach Erik Kimaiyo observed that and assigned me to pace her in some of the workouts. I found out she had also registered for the same event. I voluntarily asked her to let me pace her during the race and only pay back my registration and transport money if she finished in the first overall position. Well, she finished first in an amazing time and brought me a pot full of honey at the camp as an appreciation as she awaited to get paid.
While I was in Iten around 2011, pace-making for women was a full-time job for male runners in some camps there.
Well, this arrangement –where men sacrifice their careers to support women and later feel entitled to their successes- could be one of the contributing factors to the rise in Gender Based Violence across the athletics community in Kenya.
Athletics Kenya and the Ministry of Sports in Kenya are currently conducting a nationwide awareness campaign to fight Gender-Based Violence that has been on the rise following the murders of Agnes Tirop in 2021 and of Uganda’s Rebecca Cheptegei this year.
