Athletics, the making of champions, is Kenya’s main industry, so important that the production of news from the Rift Valley is massive, and it is not always good news. Some are rather sad and terrifying, like the latest ones to arrive, typical of the chronicle of events and brought together in a single headline: three Kenyan athletes die in brutal circumstances in the last week in the Rift Valley.
Their lives, and their way of dying young, are a reflection of the conditions in which athletics is developed in the country of 117 Olympic medalists (only in athletics) throughout history, and as many positive cases of doping in the last six years.
Kipyegon Bett, junior 800m world champion at age 16 (and ran the double lap of the track in 1m 43.76s, a mark he would never improve) and bronze medalist at the 2017 World Championships, tested positive for EPO at age 20. He was punished with four years of suspension. His sister, Purity Kirui, also an athlete, tells the BBC that the sanction, the loss of his livelihood, plunged him into a deep depression and alcoholism, a self-destructive cycle from which it was impossible to get him out despite all attempts to help him. the family and the prayers of his father, an evangelical pastor, and which closed definitively last Sunday, when he died in a hospital in Bomet, western Kenya, in the south of the Rift Valley. He entered vomiting blood. He was diagnosed with liver and kidney failure. He asked his father to pray and died.
“I tried to get him back into athletics when his ban ended, getting him equipment and running shoes,” his sister, a Commonwealth Games 3,000m steeplechase champion, told British television. “Before his death we had a plan to try once again and take him to a rehabilitation center in Kisumu. Bett was the fourth child of six siblings and dedicated himself to athletics to follow in the footsteps of his sister, who remembers his early years: “He was a gifted athlete who even beat world record holder David Rudisha in a race. That showed that he had great potential. I hoped he would return to athletics once his suspension was over, but he was unable to do so. I think that sometimes, once an athlete is sanctioned, they become depressed and start doing things that are incompatible with a sporting career.”
A few hours later, the Kenyan police reported that the body of Clement Kemboi, 32, had been found hanging from a rope tied to a tree branch in the playground of Saint Patrick’s school, in Iten, the heart of the Rift. , African 3,000m steeplechase champion in 2015. His family had reported him missing several days before. The body was missing a leg, eaten by stray dogs, according to the police investigation.
The latest police report of events is carried out by Samson Kandie, 53, winner of several marathons, including the Vienna Marathon in 2004, who died from injuries caused by thieves who tried to rob his home in Eldoret last Friday.
Just last weekend marked one month since the death of Rebecca Cheptegei, murdered by her ex-boyfriend, who doused her with gasoline and set her on fire. Although she was Ugandan, and had defended the Uganda jersey in the marathon at the Paris Olympics, Cheptegei, 33, lived and trained in Eldoret, the main Rift city, and died at Moi Teach and Referral Hospital. The athlete had a dispute with Dickson Ndiema, her previous partner, over the ownership of a home. A few days later Ndiema also died, a victim of the burns he suffered when he set her on fire.
The dark tone of the Kenyan year had begun with the death in a car accident of the new marathon god Kelvin Kiptum on February 11. Kiptum was 24 years old and in just two years of marathon running he had redefined the boundaries of the 42.195 kilometer race and the limits of the human body, bringing them, with a world record of 2h 35s, so close to the two-hour barrier, beyond the territory that seemed inaccessible in which Eliud Kipchoge, the greatest in history, had established them.
