At the Paris Olympics it took Uganda’s Rebecca Cheptegei 2hr 32min 14sec to finish 44th, just less than 10 minutes behind the winner.
It took four days for Cheptegei to die at the Moi Teaching and Referral Hospital in Eldoret City after her former boyfriend poured petrol on her and set her alight at her house in Endebess, close to the Uganda-Kenyan border, on Sunday. Cheptegei had 75% burns to her body. From what an emergency doctor told me when my brother suffered 70% burns, that would correlate to having a 25% chance of living.
It is 121.3km from Endebess to the small town of Iten beside the Great Rift Valley in Kenya. Endebess gets its name from “End Base”, as it is the final stop before climbing a big hill. Iten is “local corruption of Hill Ten, a local rock formation that was named by Joseph Thompson in 1883”, according to Wikipedia.
Almost three years ago, on October 13 2021, two-time World Athletics Championships bronze medallist Agnes Tirop was found stabbed to death in the home she had shared with her husband Ibrahim Rotich, who was also her manager. “She had been struck on the head with a garden hoe and stabbed in the neck with a kitchen knife,” according to a report. She had also been severely beaten.
In September 2021, it had taken Tirop 30min 1sec to run 10km in Herzogenaurach in Bavaria in a women-only race, setting the world record.
Six months later, in April last year, Damaris Muthee Mutua of Bahrain was murdered in the Lilies Estate just 1km from where Tirop had been killed. An autopsy concluded her “death was a result of strangulation”.
In 2018 she ran a career-best of 1hr 8min 28sec for 20km, which was the fastest time of the year. Mutua was born in Kenya before switching to Bahrain. She trained in Kapsabet, a small town between Iten and Eldoret.
The Lilies Estate home was owned by Mutua’s boyfriend, Eskinder Hailemaryam Folie, who fled to Ethiopia. He is wanted by police. Rotich was arrested soon after Tirop’s murder and his trial is continuing. Cheptegei’s partner, Dickson Ndiema, also managed to set himself on fire and is in hospital with burns. He will be charged with murder.
Live high
The New Yorker’s staff writer Alexis Okeowo travelled to Iten, 2.4km above sea level, a year ago. It is ideal for training because “like many villages in the area, sits in the mountains, almost eight thousand feet above sea level, but you can descend four thousand feet into the valley by car within half an hour”.
Athletes there can “live high and train low”, spending their non-training days at altitude so that their lungs become more efficient but running at a lower elevation, where the air is more oxygen-rich.
“Last fall, I visited the home that Tirop had shared with Rotich, a grey brick house with mauve trim and lime-green doors. A shed outside held her exercise equipment. ‘Her shoes are still here,’ Martin, her older brother, who now lives there, told me. I went to her training camp. [Joseph] Cheromei [the camp manager] was welcoming a group of Italian athletes; he has learnt several European languages in order to work with the flood of international runners. Afterwards, he took me on a tour, with Tirop’s friend and fellow-runner Mary Keitany. Tirop’s room at the camp was quiet, with a single bed under mosquito netting.
“‘In America, when you have a boyfriend he can kill you or no?’ she asked. I told her that there were laws that try to prevent this, but that domestic violence was still one of the leading causes of women being killed in the US. ‘Like here in Kenya?’ Keitany asked, surprised.”
According to 2023 report by Kenya’s Bureau of National Statistics “34% of women in the country had experienced physical violence after reaching the age of 15, with women who were or had been married almost twice as likely to report violence”.
It takes 2hr 3 min to travel between Endebess and Iten by vehicle, the same time it took Rebecca Cheptegei to run the marathon in Paris.
Rebecca was 33. Agnes was 25. Damaris was 28. It took three men to end their lives. Those are the only numbers that you need to remember.
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