Justin Lagat wrote this column on Gender-Based mostly Violence, which isn’t taking place simply in Kenya. Justin is writing about Athletics Kenya and their objective of making consciousness of the disaster.
During the last 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 world 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 received 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 12 months on the Budapest World Championships, the place Kenyan girls received three gold medals, and the boys received none.
When you find yourself the perfect on the planet, it’s exhausting to enhance as a result of you don’t have any one to review and emulate. Whereas the Kenyan males have at all times been on high of the world with their working and noticed nobody else to meet up with, their feminine counterparts have at all times tried to meet up with them day by day of their standard 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 exhausting competitors within the males’s world of working, most male runners in Kenya are comfortable to assist their feminine coaching group members change into higher runners by pacing them of their coaching and racing. It may have been organized or simply out of goodwill.
In 2007, I registered to run the 10K on the Nairobi Marathon occasion. A woman at our coaching camp would at all times follow me in our Tempo Runs, and Coach Erik Kimaiyo noticed that and assigned me to tempo her in a few of the exercises. I discovered she had additionally registered for a similar occasion. I voluntarily requested her to let me tempo her through 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 filled 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 girls was a full-time job for male runners in some camps there.
Nicely, this association –the place males sacrifice their careers to assist girls and later really feel entitled to their successes- may very well be one of many contributing components to the rise in Gender Based mostly Violence throughout the athletics neighborhood in Kenya.
Athletics Kenya and the Ministry of Sports activities in Kenya are at present conducting a nationwide consciousness marketing campaign to struggle Gender-Based mostly Violence that has been on the rise following the murders of Agnes Tirop in 2021 and of Uganda’s Rebecca Cheptegei this 12 months.
