‘I was almost the marathon world champion’
On the eve of the World Athletics Championships in Beijing, Adharanand Finn hears the remarkable story of Kenya’s Simon Biwott, who came second in the marathon in 2001, in the closest finish in world championship history.hip
It was a warm August evening in Edmonton, Canada. People were standing out in the streets in shorts and T-shirts, watching the empty road, waiting for the runners to come by. Helicopters churned in the sky, not far away. The world’s television cameras zoomed in on the two leaders. Side by side they ran, eyes fixed ahead, an Ethiopian and a Kenyan. It was a familiar story.
“This is the Red Socks against the Yankies,” the NBC commentator enthused. “Whichever sport you like, pick the biggest battle you can. This is it.” Kenya versus Ethiopia. The two kings of the most accessible, most universal sport in the world: long-distance running.
After almost 42km of racing, the two men were still side by side as they entered the Commonwealth Stadium to the roar of 60,000 spectators. Their legs drove on, around the final bend, both trying, at the end of more than two hours of hard running, to outsprint the other. Their faces were straining, their teeth gnashing. But only one could win. The Ethiopian, Gezahegne Abera, the reigning Olympic champion, somehow edged one stride ahead as they approached the line and hit the tape first to claim the 2001 world marathon title in the closest finish in world championship history. The cameras zoomed in on his stunned face. By the time they zoomed back out, the third placed runner was racing in.
We didn’t get to see the second-placed runner again. Perhaps he had stepped off the track already. Yet another Kenyan. What was his name?Simon Biwott.Never heard of him.
Years later …
I’m driving north out of Eldoret on the Uganda Highway, up in Kenya’s Rift Valley. The town doesn’t have a definite end, but gradually peters out into a scattering of chaotic wooden shops, kiosks and half-built colleges. Donkey carts and wobbly bicycles laden with sacks of charcoal and crates of chickens struggle to compete with the constant grinding of traffic. Huge lorries puff along slowly as cars and minibuses dart around them on either side, beeping just for the hell of it.
About two miles out of town, I turn left. There’s an upturned tractor tire stuck into the ground, and painted along it’s curve are the words Livingstone Academy. The small dirt side road passes a seemingly abandoned row of wooden buildings. A girl sits on the counter of a mango stall and watches me pass. Outside a row of tiny concrete houses, tired women sit on the steps in front of buckets and gaze as my car goes by. Up ahead, I see the gates of the school.
I’m here to meet the school director, Simon Biwott. The school director and once, in the closest finish in history, almost the marathon world champion.
Biwott smiles as I get out of my car and greets me with a handshake. He’s now 41 and is a tall, placid man who has the kind but sober manner of a church minister. He brings me straight into his office, down a narrow corridor. Once inside, he takes his jacket off and sits down.
“So,” he says, “You want to know what happened? How is it that a poor boy from Kenya almost became world champion that night?”
Biwott’s story is remarkable, but it is also typical of the tough route to success that most of Kenya’s incredible runners have to traverse in order to win the world’s top races. In 2014, 95 of the top 100 fastest marathons of the year were run by men from Kenya and Ethiopia. Each one of those runners has an amazing story.
Biwott grew up herding goats in a small village about 20 miles from Eldoret in western Kenya. Like everyone else, he used to run to school. When I first arrived in Kenya, I had assumed the story of children running to school was something of a romanticised myth, but there they were each morning, skipping and racing along, up and down the banked verges of the dirt roads, and often barefoot. Many of the children race home and back at lunchtime, too, sprinting as fast as they can not to get into trouble for being late.
Once at school, Biwott liked the games lessons because it meant he got free bread and soda.
“We didn’t know much about athletics,” he says. “But we knew about Kip Keino [who won Olympic gold in 1968 and again in 1972]. They used to circumcise women in our village and, at the ceremony, the girls sang about Kip Keino, so we knew his name. We didn’t really know what it was, but we thought this athletics must be a serious business.”
Biwott showed promise at running and competed often for his primary school, but he was never quite good enough to make the district team. Then, in 1986, when he was 16, a tractor plough collapsed on his leg and left him badly injured. He couldn’t run at all for the next three years.
In 1989, he started at high school and began running again. His leg felt better and, in the summer of 1989, he managed to get into the 5000m trial race for the Commonwealth Games.
“I finished second,” he says, “But there was confusion with lapped runners and they thought I had another lap to run, so I didn’t make the team.”
As he talks, a woman comes in to the room with a jug of water and a basin. I hold out my hands as she pours water over them. Biwott does the same. Then she goes out and comes back with a tray of food. A loaf of sliced bread and a packet of biscuits. Biwott pauses his story and sits in silence as she carefully places some of the bread slices in one bowl and the biscuits in another. Then she leaves.
“In 1990, [when he was 20] I started serious training,” he says. “I was made cross country captain at the school and I was in top form. I used to leave my colleagues standing.”
But then his leg became mysteriously infected. Rather than visit a doctor, he went to a local medicine man, who rubbed ash on it.
“I think it worked. Someone later told me if I’d gone to the hospital they would have amputated it.” The leg took five months to heal, but afterwards it looked much thinner than the other leg. Thinking he couldn’t run anymore, Biwott gave up athletics. Life was hard for him. To pay his school fees and buy his uniform, he planted a vegetable garden and sold vegetables at the side of the road.
Four years later, Biwott finished high school. He was 24.
“Wasn’t that quite old to be finishing school?” I ask him.
“I think I started late,” he says. He gives me a big grin. Outside the window, children are peering in. I can hear chanting from one of the classrooms.
“I went back to my village and decided to open a small kiosk selling vegetables, sugar and things like that. I wanted to become a business man. I had lost all interest in athletics.”
But, one day, someone pinned a notice on his kiosk about a race to select a team for the district championships. When he saw the letter, it motivated him to start training again. But the race was just one week later. Still, he ran the 5000m anyway, and won. In the district championships, he came second.
“After the district race, a man approached me and told me about a camp where you could train for a possible scholarship to the US. So I found a man to look after my kiosk and went to the camp, in a place called Kapsabet.”
When he got there, he ran a trial race and came fifth. Rather than take him into the camp, the captain told him to find somewhere to stay in the town and that they would monitor his progress. But he had no money for lodgings, so he moved in with some relatives, 20 miles away. It was the best solution he could come up with, but without money to travel in to the camp each day, he ended up training by himself, just heading out for runs each morning with no real structure to what he was doing. After a while, he thought he should return to look after his kiosk.
“But when I got back to my village, the kiosk wasn’t there.” The man he had charged with looking after it had sold everything and run off with the money. Rather than despair, Biwott saw it as a sign that he should concentrate on athletics.
“I trusted in God,” he says, looking at me with unwavering eyes. “I trusted that it was meant to be. So I started training again.”
He moved to join another group in Eldoret, staying with relatives and selling paraffin to get money to buy food. He was now 25. After a good performance in the provincial cross country championships, he was approached by an army officer, who took him to train in a base in Nairobi. After three days, they set up a trial race. The race was packed with runners who had raced internationally, but Biwott managed to come fourth.
“Afterwards, the coach came over to me and said: ‘Where have you been all this time?’”
So Biwott joined the army team training in the Ngong Hills outside Nairobi. There were no jobs in the army at that time, but they gave him a bed to sleep in and food to eat. He cleaned the swimming pool to get enough money to buy some soap.
He lived in a tent and trained with a group that included a number of top international runners. His coach told him he was doing well, and told him to get himself a passport, in case he got asked to race abroad.
Things were finally working out for him, when in 1996 he got injured again.
“For the first time,” he says, “I was bitter. I decided to come home. I didn’t want to become a soldier, so I got a job selling fertiliser in a farm shop.”
I knew my talent was real
There were very few runners from his area, and the people who knew him told him to forget about running. His father, usually after a few drinks, would tell him that it was a waste of time.
“’You’ve trained this long and nothing has happened,’ he’d say to me. ‘You should stay in the shop.’” His mother was the only one who never gave up on him, always offering him encouragement.
In August of 1997, when Biwott was 27, two things happened to inspire him to start running again. Firstly, Paul Tergat broke the world record in the 10,000m. Then a week later Wilson Boit Kipketer broke the steeplechase world record.
“These were people I knew. I had run with them in the past and I could keep up with them. So I knew my talent was real,” he says.
Although he stayed working in the shop, he started training again. At the end of the year, he met up with one of his old friends from the army camp, who told him an Italian agent called Dr Rosa was holding a trial run near his village.
“I was surprised. Why were they coming to my village? I joined the trial but I didn’t know how far we were running. About 30 of us stood together on the start line. Some of them knew me, but others were wondering who I was.”
They started running and Biwott kept up with the lead group as gradually people started dropping off the pace.
“At around 32km – I later found out – I asked if I could stop, but my friend John Kemboi told me to keep running.”
He was still running blind, not knowing where they were going or how far. When Dr Rosa appeared in his truck handing out water, Biwott didn’t know what to do with it – he had never drunk water while running before.
“At about 36km, I noticed people were starting to push the pace, so I pushed too. In the end there were five of us who finished together.”
Dr Rosa was very surprised by the new man’s ability.
“Have you been abroad?” he asked him.
“No,” said Biwott.
“Do you have a passport?”
“Yes.”
“Do you want to join us?”
“Yes.”
The other four people he had finished with all went to the Amsterdam marathon a few months later and one of them won. Biwott was told he was going to race in Cancun, in Mexico. But a few weeks before, he ran a cross country race and fell, and got injured.
“I went home again,” he says. “Sometimes athletics is a steep hill to climb. But I was happy. Somehow I knew this was the last obstacle. I knew my time had come.”
In March 1998, at the age of 28, Biwott ran his first race abroad, the Rome marathon.
“It was very exciting to be abroad,” he says. “Very, very exciting. Just to observe how the plane moved. To see the lights on the ground as we flew through the sky. It was wonderful.”
He came 5th in the race and won around $6,000 – more than the average annual salary in Kenya at the time. The first thing he did with his winnings was buy a camera.
“I didn’t know if I was ever going to race abroad again, so I bought the camera thinking I could use it to start a business.”
When he got back to Kenya he went straight back to his village. He hadn’t even told anyone in his family that he was going abroad.
“After all my setbacks, I didn’t know if it was certain until I got there,” he says. “So I didn’t want to say anything.”
Back in his village, he spent the rest of the money paying off school fees for his brothers and sisters.
The next year, he ran the Mexico City marathon, and won. This time, when he got back to Kenya, he built his parents a house.
He won another few races in Mexico, and then, in 2000, he was a surprise selection for the Kenyan team for the Olympics. This was a huge achievement, but at the last minute the selectors changed their minds and he was dropped from the team. As he was in the middle of a serious training schedule, preparing for the Olympics, Dr Rosa sent him to Berlin, one of the biggest marathons in the world, but as a pacemaker. He still hadn’t achieved enough to earn an invite for the main race.
“I did the pacing job I was paid to do, leading the race until 28km,” he says. “Then I pulled over, but instead of dropping out, I joined on the back of the leading group. At 31km I retook the lead – and I never looked back.”
He won. It was a big story – the pacemaker who stole away with victory. Biwott was now in the big time. He had won the Berlin marathon in 2:06:49 – which ended up being his fastest time ever – and in 2001 he was selected to run for Kenya in the world championships, where he came 2nd by just one second.
“I was that close,” he says, holding up his thumb and forefinger. Still, it was a big story in Kenya – the first medal in a world marathon since 1988. “I was on the front pages of all the newspapers,” he says.
He looks up at me. The sun has moved around and a thin line of yellow streaks the wall behind him.
“Do you want a break?” he asks me. I nod. We’ve been talking for almost four hours. He takes me out into the sunlight, locking his office door behind him. Children crowd around me, wanting to shake my hand. Biwott walks solemnly across the courtyard to the far end. There are a couple of toilets behind one of the classrooms. He motions to one and then goes into the other. I open the door and enter.
Inside, it’s just a small concrete cell with a hole in the middle of the ground. Once the door is closed it’s too dark inside to see even the hole. The smell is overwhelming. I hold my breath and aim somewhere in the middle of the floor.
Biwott is waiting for me when I get back outside. He leads me back to his office to finish his story. The year after the world championships, he injured his back. Although he still managed to win a few big marathons, including Rotterdam, his back got worse and he retired at the end of 2003 to set up his school. This is a surprisingly common thing for ex-runners to do. It is partly a way to give something back to the community, partly legacy building, and partly, as the schools are fee-paying, a business to help them through their long retirement.
“When you take it seriously,” he says wistfully, “training is hard. But I miss the experience of running in a team. The way we are all striking the ground together as we run. It was a very enjoyable thing.”
Before I leave, he asks me to greet the children. “Tell them something that will inspire them with their studies,” he says.
In the first classroom, the children spark up a welcoming chant as we enter. Biwott asks them how they are, and they all answer in monotone unison: “We’re fine, thank you sir, and how are you?”
“We are very lucky today,” he says. “We have a very special visitor from Great Britain.”
He tells them that I’m a great writer and that, if they study hard at school, they, too, one day could be writers, or doctors, or engineers, and they too could travel the world.
The children watch me blankly, this scruffy, bearded white man in their midst. What can I tell them that could possibly have any meaning?
Before I can think of an answer, Biwott has handed over to me. I have to speak. Amazingly, utterances come out of my mouth, platitudes about the world being full of opportunity to those who concentrate at school. It sounds good, but hollow, too.
They just stare back at me. After I finish the teacher tells them to clap me, and that God is great.
“God is great and deserves a high five,” they all chant in response, labouriously turning and high-fiving the person next to them.
Outside in the courtyard, I breathe a sign of relief.
“Now class seven,” says Biwott, and before I know it we’re trudging in single file into the next classroom to repeat the exercise all over again.
The truth is that the opportunities open to these children from the poorest corners of Eldoret are cruelly limited, no matter how hard they work on learning their times tables. Biwott, by starting his school, is doing his best to help them, but he achieved what he did not by studying, but by tenaciously digging to unearth his talent. He was also lucky that his talent was for the thing that provides the best and most realistic chance of worldly success in this corner of east Africa: running. With role models such as Biwott around every corner, it’s no wonder that the streets of Eldoret and all the surrounding villages are full every morning of thousands of Lycra-clad young men and women, flying along the dirt roads, chasing the dream of becoming a top marathon runner. And seeing how fast they all run, it’s no wonder that so many of them succeed.
• Adharanand Finn is the author of Running with the Kenyans and The Way of the Runner (both Faber & Faber)
Source: theguardian