Justin Lagat wrote this column on Gender-Primarily based Violence, which isn’t occurring simply in Kenya. Justin is writing about Athletics Kenya and their aim of making consciousness of the disaster.
Over the past 20 years or so, from the eyes of a Kenyan male runner, a sports activities journalist, and a coach, I’ve noticed Kenyan girls slowly start to overhaul their male counterparts in successful main international championships.
In the previous few years, since round 2008, Kenya’s feminine stars have began to rise quickly in comparison with their male stars. Earlier than lengthy, they’ve been reaping extra medals on the Olympics and World Championships.
On the latest Paris Olympics, Kenya gained 4 gold medals, three of them from girls and just one from a person. In distinction, Kenyan males have been the one ones successful gold medals on the Olympics since 1968, earlier than Pamela Jelimo and Nancy Langat lastly opened the doorways for them on the Beijing 2008 Olympics.
It has been an identical situation on the World Athletics Championships. The alternative of what occurred in 1987 in Rome occurred final yr on the Budapest World Championships, the place Kenyan girls gained three gold medals, and the lads gained none.
If you end up the most effective on the planet, it’s arduous to enhance as a result of you haven’t any one to check and emulate. Whereas the Kenyan males have all the time been on prime of the world with their operating and noticed nobody else to meet up with, their feminine counterparts have all the time tried to meet up with them each day of their regular coaching exercises.
In Kenya, if an elite lady runner doesn’t have private male tempo setters in coaching, you usually discover them coaching inside a males’s group.
With the arduous competitors within the males’s world of operating, most male runners in Kenya are comfortable to assist their feminine coaching group members turn out to be higher runners by pacing them of their coaching and racing. It might have been organized or simply out of goodwill.
In 2007, I registered to run the 10K on the Nairobi Marathon occasion. A girl at our coaching camp would all the time keep on with me in our Tempo Runs, and Coach Erik Kimaiyo noticed that and assigned me to tempo her in among the exercises. I came upon she had additionally registered for a similar occasion. I voluntarily requested her to let me tempo her throughout the race and solely pay again my registration and transport cash if she completed within the first total place. Nicely, she completed first in an incredible time and introduced me a pot stuffed with honey on the camp as an appreciation as she awaited to receives a commission.
Whereas I used to be in Iten round 2011, pace-making for ladies was a full-time job for male runners in some camps there.
Nicely, this association –the place males sacrifice their careers to help girls and later really feel entitled to their successes- might be one of many contributing elements to the rise in Gender Primarily based Violence throughout the athletics neighborhood in Kenya.
Athletics Kenya and the Ministry of Sports activities in Kenya are presently conducting a nationwide consciousness marketing campaign to battle Gender-Primarily based Violence that has been on the rise following the murders of Agnes Tirop in 2021 and of Uganda’s Rebecca Cheptegei this yr.
