Girded by struggles, Loroupe runs for Kenyan gold

SEVEN TIMES Africans have won the Olympic marathon, but they have been a barefoot Ethiopian running through the torchlit night in Rome, and a South African miner racing into daylight after the darkness of apartheid. An Ethiopian woman has won, too, cheered on by expatriate taxi drivers in Atlanta, dropping to her knees at the finish line and kissing the track.

For Kenya, there has been nothing more substantial than one silver medal and one bronze. How could that be? It seems astonishing, considering that the Kenyans run with such graceful domination in Boston and New York and everywhere on the roads, bunching and surging in packs, such elegant wolves.

Now, however, Kenya is favoured to win its first Olympic marathon at the Games in Sydney. But the race comes with a cultural twist. In a highly patriarchal society where women play a subservient role, it is a woman, Tegla Loroupe, who is expected to achieve Kenya's first gold medal in the marathon at the Summer Games. She appears fragile at 4 feet 11 inches and 82 pounds, yet she is an insistent wraith, holding the world record of 2 hours 20 minutes 43 seconds and refusing to succumb to the pressures of her country and her father to live a chattel life of domestic servitude.

Even if she wins the 26.2-mile women's marathon on Sept. 24, Loroupe will not be satisfied. Three days later, in what will require extraordinary endurance, she intends to run the preliminary round of the 10,000 metres, a distance of 6.2 miles, at which she finished sixth at the 1996 Atlanta Games.

``Kenya has never had a woman win a gold medal at the Olympics, so it would be great to be the first,'' Loroupe, 27, said in a recent interview in New York. ``It will be a payback for all the struggles I went through.''

The struggles continue, even now. In late July, when she returned to participate in the Kenyan Olympic trials, track officials inscrutably entered Loroupe in the 1,500 metres, the metric mile, a distance for which she has neither the foot speed nor the desire to run. Like many Kenyan runners, she has had frequent clashes with the national track and field federation. She refused to run the 1,500, telling organisers that she would enter the 10,000 even if she had to compete without a number signifying an official entry. They relented. She ran the 10,000. She finished first.

A childhood of pain

To demonstrate her own willfulness, Loroupe tells a troubling story of how she nearly committed infanticide as a young girl in the western Kenyan village of Kapsait. She does not remember the incident, but said she had been told of it by her mother, Mary Lotuma. The story has been confirmed by Anne Roberts, who recruits the top runners yearly for the New York City Marathon, which Loroupe has won twice. The two are so close that Loroupe calls Roberts ``Mom.''

When Tegla was not yet 3, she said, her mother gave birth in the fields of the family farm to a brother named Philip and returned home still bleeding from the delivery. Apparently associating the newborn with her mother's pain and suffering, Tegla said she grabbed the baby and began dragging it toward a fire in the house.

``If he wasn't there, my mother wouldn't be hurt anymore,'' she said. Her mother intervened, slapping Tegla so hard that she nearly lost consciousness and sending her to live with an aunt until she was 7. Her aunt had her own children, and Tegla was put in charge of caring for an infant, even though she was a child herself. She had little to wear, she said, and her relatives refused to buy her clothes or send her to school. Eventually, she could stand it no longer. One day, she took off and ran several miles back to her mother's house, so desperate to get away that she crossed a small stream, frightened because she could not swim.

Tegla had also been born in a maize field, her mother going into labour as she worked in the land. When she was young, Loroupe said, she had experienced respiratory problems, and her mother once walked with her an entire day to the nearest hospital. By the time Tegla was 5, she was hauling water and firewood and infant children on her back. It is this ability to withstand great hardship, Loroupe believes, that makes athletes from developing nations into the best distance runners. Her own mother, she said, once told her: ``You'll be the best. You can take the pain.''

``It is difficult for me to believe how strong I am,'' Loroupe said. ``I worked so hard when I was young. Running is just a minor thing to me, compared with what I was doing with my family. I carried a lot of water and firewood. I had a lot of strain on my shoulders.'' Her father, Loroupe Losiwa, did not want her to attend school. Or to run. He believed his daughter should live a traditional, servile life, working in the fields, getting married at 18, having children.

It was her mother and her eldest sister, Albina, who pushed her to get an education. Her mother had been an orphan and taught her the value of independence. Her sister told her that if she owned things of her own, men would not own her.

``My father thought I would be spoiled by school,'' Loroupe said. ``He was fearing that I would go out of the family and get pregnant and no one would take care of me. But my mother had a tough life and she didn't want that for her children.''

She is a distance runner, but her words come forward in short bursts. Her speech is as forceful as her running. When she first came to New York, to run a 10-kilometre race in Central Park in 1993, a bicyclist was obstructing her path, so she shoved the bicycle aside to get to the front.

``Women are the workhorses in Kenyan culture,'' Loroupe said. ``They carry the country on their backs. Because of polygamy, they are left alone to raise their children. It was a terrible hardship for my mother. She said to me: `I wanted to leave. There was much pain. I thought about it and then I realised that no one would take care of my children, so I stayed.' She was determined that her children would have a better life. My mother told me to go to school. I always wanted to do something better than the others.''

In elementary school, Roberts said, Tegla persuaded her father to let her run if she got better math grades than her brother Philip. ``It was a safe bet,'' Roberts said. ``Tegla knew she was smarter than her brother but her father didn't.''

When, at 12, Loroupe was sent to boarding school in the nearest town, Kapenguria, her father demanded that she stop running. If allowed to continue school, she would have to concentrate on her studies. For six months, she listened, then another student gave her away. Tegla was an accomplished runner, one girl told school officials. Her secret was out.

The school gave her a choice, Loroupe said. She would have to run. If she did not cooperate, she would be forced to circle the school track on her knees as punishment. She had no running clothes, no running shoes, just her blouse and skirt, but she ran anyway, even if she disobeyed her father's wishes. ``Nobody caught me,'' she said. ``My teacher said, `She has a big mouth, but she is a very good runner.'

She became a national high school champion at the middle distances and in cross country, took college accounting classes and became an auditor for the Kenyan postal service. In the fall of 1994, Loroupe won the New York City Marathon, running so patiently and stealthily that the other contenders never saw her take the lead. She was the first African woman to win a major marathon. When she returned home to her village, she received gifts of livestock and land and the now familiar welcome from women in her Pokot ethnic group who told her: ``You showed that we are like the men - we can do things. We are not useless.'' A year later, she won in New York again.

``She has been very important to me,'' said Catherine Ndereba, a Kenyan who won the 2000 Boston Marathon. ``When I started running in 1994, I learned about her in magazines. I knew she was a star in our country and I was copying her.''

On Sept. 26, 1999, Loroupe set the marathon world record in Berlin. A limited-issue postage stamp has been released bearing her likeness. At the recent Kenyan trials, Roberts said, Loroupe was granted an audience with the country's longtime president, Daniel Arap Moi.

Winning father's approval the sentimental thing is to believe that her achievements have filled the sails of all Kenyan women. More accurately, she has been merely a brilliant gust, welcoming, but only temporarily relieving. Women in Kenya still suffer harsh economic privation, educational disparity, job discrimination. Only 9 of the 224 Members of Parliament are women, said the country's most prominent female politician, Charity Ngilu, who in 1997 became the first woman to run for the presidency.

``We are very proud of Tegla, but until we get more women in positions of decision making, we are not going to make an impact,'' Ngilu said in a telephone interview from Nairobi. ``When I ran for the presidency, I was known through the media in Europe and America much more than in my own country. I think it is the same with Tegla.''

Loroupe owns land and houses in Kenya, but she spends only a month or two at home each year, training instead in Germany with her longtime coach and manager, Volker Wagner.

Parasites in the food and water in Kenya worry her. So does the rising crime rate. Last April, just before she won the London Marathon, Loroupe had 20 head of cattle stolen from Kapsait.

Rustling is often done with guns now, and her mother and her older brother, Julius, were shot at as they pursued the livestock on a 100- mile trek to the Ugandan border, Loroupe said. Eventually, she said, a Ugandan minister who was also an ethnic Pokot had the cattle rounded up and returned.

There is another reason not to spend more time in Kenya. She is a professional athlete, but when she goes home Loroupe is expected to resume old chores, hauling wood and water. ``No one is an idol,'' she said.

She can earn more than $1 million a year from running, an astounding figure in such a poor country, but her personal responsibilities are immense. Her sister Albina died of a mysterious ailment in 1995, and Tegla is putting Albina's six children through school. She is also paying expenses for two of her sisters who attend college in the United States, and she tries to aid young Kenyan girls with running camps and equipment. This is what Loroupe thinks she might do when she retires, something for women in sports.

``She has an enormous emotional burden for someone so young,'' Roberts said. ``It worries me sometimes.''

There are no guarantees at the Olympics. The marathon is a women's only race, and Loroupe has run her best in the company of men, who can pace her and protect her from the wind. - New York Times News Service

JERE LONGMAN

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