---------- Forwarded message ---------- Date: Fri, 20 Apr 2001 17:25:41 -0700 From: "Eamonn Condon" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: "Track & Field" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Reply-To: "Eamonn Condon" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Subject: London Marathon: Loroupe's school run of glory The Electronic Telegraph Saturday 21 April 2001 Sue Mott TEGLA LOROUPE had a school run, but not like yours and mine. We think of a school run as double parking in a people carrier waiting for a dirty-faced moppet to appear on the horizon with their jumper on backwards. Loroupe's was less abstract. It was simple. She ran. Ten kilometres there, 10 kilometres back. Every day. From the age of seven. "I didn't know I was training," she said, a giggle escaping from behind a smiling string of pearl-white teeth. Twenty years on, the daughter of a Kenyan Rift Valley farmer is the London Marathon's defending champion and the fastest woman over 26.2 miles. So it worked, the inadvertent training, and her reward has been not merely the amassing of a decent fortune with which she supports her dead sister's six children, and puts two other sisters through medical school in Ohio, but she also fomented a cultural revolution back home in the tribal lands of the Pokot. In her childhood it was not done for girls to aspire to a career in athletics. They had work to do. When little Tegla ran home from school she would tend the cattle, sheep and goats. She would be sent out to collect firewood and at certain times of the year she would be required, like the rest of the family, to heft sacks of maize weighing more than she did up to the farm's mountainous storage area. That was the accidental high altitude training. She became as strong as an ox while being about the size of a cricket. Even now, at 27, the indisputable queen of marathon running is only 4ft 11in and weighs little more than six stone. She looks as though she needs her running shoes less for foot support than to anchor her to the earth. Without them, she might simply go sailing through the air, a mote untethered by gravity. That would be in keeping with her life story, which has been a series of quietly accomplished, steel-willed escape. It began gently enough, with the wish to avoid a good thrashing for being late to school. "You got punished if you were late. I didn't like to be beaten. None of us did so everybody ran. Also running in Kenya is like football in your country. It was our main sport, our main love. "I wanted to be the fastest in my class and I wanted to be more quick than my brothers because my father, he used to favour his boys. That is normal in Kenya. So I wanted to prove I was better than his sons." And could she beat them? "Of course, yes!" she replied, as though the matter could never have been in the slightest doubt. Her father, Abraham, was a polygamist. She had many stepbrothers and sisters but her immediate family consisted of three sisters and two brothers, William and Julius, and it was upon these two that she concentrated her considerable energies. "But it was not easy for me. My community, they did not like me to run. My mother didn't like me to compete. She was afraid that if her daughter was taken out of the family she would be spoiled." Little could her mother have known that one day her daughter would fly her to New York to watch her win the marathon amid the soaring concrete and urban chaos of Manhattan. "She was just amazed," Loroupe said. "Amazed by the buildings and the people." But indomitable spirit plainly runs in the family. Mum absorbed her culture shock and went shopping. In the end, young Tegla's competitive running career was saved when her parents sent her to boarding school in Kenya, where an English headmistress, whose name she still remembers - Barbara Cottier - first spotted, and then fiercely encouraged, the wondrous athletic talent of her tiny pupil. First, though, there was a major problem to overcome. Her father, still unconvinced by such a competitive daughter, had made her pledge to abandon running at school in favour of her studies. She tried hard to bow to the demand. But her fame as a runner had spread and the school insisted she should run on sports day. "A teacher said there is a very good, very small runner in this school and she must run. But I was in the first year. I was shy. I didn't want to say it was me and also I had made that promise to my father. I said, `No, I am not a runner'. Then they say, `If you don't run we will make you run 400 metres on your knees as a punishment'. So I must run, not in the first team, not in the second team, but in the last team with the fat ladies. I ran very fast and when I reached the one kilometre mark I looked around and there was no one there." The whole school had been left for dead by a Lilliputian first year on light speed. The "fat ladies team" won the cup for the first time in the school's history and there was no looking back for Loroupe. "I realised then that running is something that is really in my heart." She passed all her exams and then decided to be a nun. "I did really," she laughed, and confided that much of the appeal of the nunnery had stemmed from the fact she would escape the life of a typical African woman on the farm. In the end, however, she did an accountancy course and listened intently to her brother, William, who told her: "Tegla, you have another mission." Sometimes that mission looks like shopping these days. She and Joyce Chepchumba, her Kenyan team-mate, are regulars in Harrods. "I like clothes. Anything that fits me I buy because I am so small." Even if it does not quite fit, she may find the lure irresistible. There are tales of her sweeping Monte Carlo in a voluminous fur coat, thrilled and drowned simultaneously, but most of her purchases encompass sincere generosity and kindness towards friends and relations. "I love to buy books and clothes for my neighbours in Kenya who don't have much." Devoutly Christian, her principle expenditure is on the children of her eldest sister who died suddenly in 1995, struck down within 24 hours by a mystery illness. Loroupe pays for them all to attend boarding school, bankrolled by the wealth that winning marathons in New York, Rotterdam, Berlin and London, among many other global prizes, has brought her. But the transition from African farm girl to international athletics star was a particularly stubborn obstacle course. She has never enjoyed good relations with the Kenyan Athletics Federation. Fissures in understanding run along tribal lines. The Pokot tribe are less than beloved by the Nandi tribe from whence much of the officialdom is drawn. There have been times, as in the 1992 World Cross-Country Championships, when Loroupe qualified for the event only to find herself de-selected, and the newspapers told that she was sick. "I was not sick but what could I do? I would just go home and cry." Finding a suitable training group also proved problematic. By the age of 18, she had been sent to Germany to train under the wing of a manager with connections to the Kenyan federation. But it was Christmas time, the manager had gone away on holiday and Loroupe was living in a youth hostel from which she was ejected each morning while it was being cleaned. Her money had been drained away, she was barely eating and when she came fourth in a race meeting it was more than sporting disaster. Only the first three were paid. That was how Volker Wagner, her present manager, found her. "She was so small and tiny and I was surprised this little girl was trying to make her way after coming out of Africa. It was such a struggle. I didn't know how she could possibly survive, but I admired her great courage. I remember thinking, `This is very special'. " Wagner sympathised greatly and bought her meals when he came across her, but as he worked with an all-male group of Kenyans and Tanzanian athletes there was nothing further he could do. He thought. But one night he found himself being followed. "All the way to my car Tegla followed me with her small steps. She said: `I would like to join your group'. But I didn't understand her because she was so shy she had her hand in front of her mouth. But eventually I did understand and I told her it was impossible because I only worked with men." Loroupe was not a girl to take no for an answer. "I knew what he was meaning," she said, picking up the story. "So I told him: `I will not play around with the men. I am a Christian. I come from a family of brothers and I will not mess around'. I think Volker was quite shocked to hear a little girl talking like this, but he agreed to let me join and then he joked that it would be good to have a woman around to do all the work for the men." The joke, however, rebounded unfortunately when the male runners in the group decided to take it literally. While Wagner was away, they asked Loroupe to clean their tracksuits and cook for them. With her African upbringing robbing her of the chance to read tracts by Germaine Greer, she felt she had no choice but to agree. When Wagner returned he found her struggling with mounds of washing. "You've got a lot of clothes," he said. "It's not mine, it's the others," she replied. "Oh, he was mad," Loroupe remembered happily. "He told them: `You don't have a woman here, you have an athlete. We are all athletes together'. Now we have a great deal of respect for each other. I like living with men. We talk about business, how to invest money. It is not like being with women. We do not have useless gossips." By 1999, she was all conquering. Since then a wrongly diagnosed injury has impeded her progress and food poisoning at the Sydney Olympics left her trailing in a bemused and frustrated 13th in the marathon. But she is feeling sharper now she said, ominously for Chepchumba, Lydia Simon, of Romania, and Ethiopia's Derartu Tulu, the other leading marathon women. She is entirely philosophical about her poor Olympic performance. "It was a disappointing way for all that energy to end. But God has given me a lot of success. He has plans for me. I am satisfied." And so is her father. Finally. Abraham has experienced a profound change of heart and one that took considerable courage to admit. "My father has changed his mind. He has never come to one of my races but he has found out what is going on. Now he respects me." Her light, lyrical voice hushed to a virtual whisper. "He told me: `I wish you were one of my sons'. " Eamonn Condon WWW.RunnersGoal.com
