The Curse of Kenya’s Long-Distance Runners
June 05, 2025 at 12:04AMMarathoner Kelvin Kiptum was just arriving to the sport’s highest echelon when he died in a car crash in February 2024. As it turns out, his story is just one in a series that has befallen competitive runners from Kenya. For 1843, Jonathan W. Rosen reports from the training meccas of the Rift Valley region, painting a heartbreaking picture of an uphill course that all too often ends in tragedy.
Somehow, though, the money was never enough. With a view to becoming a property magnate, Kipsang took out high-interest loans to finance construction projects, which he then couldn’t pay off. He fell victim to con artists, losing $40,000 in a scam to buy gold that turned out to be fake and $250,000 in a scheme that promised to “multiply” currency. He partied hard in Eldoret’s nightclubs and crashed his car on several occasions; one accident left him with a prominent scar on the right side of his head.
When we met in Eldoret in January for a lunch of goat and roast potatoes, Kipsang was back in training after a four-year ban for missing a series of drugs tests. (A recent spike in doping has put Kenya’s athletes under greater scrutiny.) At 44, he still owns a hotel in Iten, though his property empire never materialised. “When you win a big race, and you get a lot of money, you think you are on top of the world,” he said. “But it’s so easy to mess it up.”
from Longreads https://longreads.com/2025/06/04/curse-kenyas-distance-runners/
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