Cheruiyot Shows Grace Amid Unrest

Jeff Jacobs

April 22, 2008

BOSTON — Their names are Cheruiyot, Tanui and Ndeti. Those are mere aliases for these Boston Marathon champions. They are in reality Serenity, Modesty and Grace.

Athletics can be a loud, violent pursuit. Athletic competition is nothing if not a game of perpetual collision and, as the years wear on, one of unending bluster. There is the crash of bones, crash of vehicles, crash of wood against ball and, invariably, the crash of chest-bumping bravado.

And then there are the Kenyans.

Like Sandburg's "Fog," they come on little cat feet.

The Kenyans arrive in packs, yet they run without sound. Do their feet even touch the ground? You wonder. They barely leave a footprint. To watch the Kenyans run 26.2 miles is to understand tranquillity. They are Walden Pond on two willowy reeds.

A Kenyan finished first at Boston for the 16th time in 18 years Monday, yet they remain the most gracious of winners. Their idea of a boast is a broad smile from under a champion's wreath.

"Happy."

That was Robert Cheruiyot's one-word answer, and it remains the Kenyans' answer whenever they're asked how it is to win another marathon.

If the portrait of athletic peace ever were to be commissioned by the United Nations, it would be a small pack of Kenyans running through the highlands of their African home. Smiling, yes, smiling as they run.

And that's what has made the violence in Cheruiyot's homeland this year — this Olympic year — all the more disturbing. Kenya has been a nation of civility on an often brutal continent. Yet more than 1,000 Kenyans, including two prominent athletes, have died in the unrest stemming from a disputed — rigged is probably the more appropriate word — presidential election. Tribal conflict set the Kikuyu against the Luo. More than 300,000 Kenyans were displaced.

On Monday, Cheruiyot became the fourth man to win the Boston Marathon four times. Bill Rodgers is the only other one to have done it in the past half century. Cheruiyot set a blistering pace, and he finished off the field by running the 19th mile through the hills in an ungodly 4:37. His goal was 2:07. He would run 2:07:46. Without a soul to challenge him, he finished 32 seconds off the course record he set in 2006.

"I am not disappointed," Cheruiyot said.

Lance Armstrong, the greatest cyclist in history, ran his third marathon. After a 2:50:58 in his first at Boston, he recounted the unrelenting toll of running up and down the series of hills from miles 18 to 21.

"You never have that pain and pounding on the bike," Armstrong said.

And Cheruiyot?

"I enjoy the hills," he said.

Ibrahim Hussein, Cosmas Ndeti, Moses Tanui, Lameck Aguta, Joseph Chebet, Elijah Lagat, Rodgers Rop, Timothy Cherigat, Cheruiyot ... nine different Kenyans have won since 1991, essentially making the world's oldest marathon Nairobi on the Fens. Yet the hard truth is the more the Kenyans win the less the Boston Marathon becomes a marquee competition in New England. It has become more a participative event like the Fourth of July parade.

Talk radio was focused elsewhere Monday. Boston's print cleanup hitters weren't on hand, either. It's understandable. The Sox were at Fenway. The Celtics and Bruins are relevant again and the Bruins had a Game 7 in Montreal. The Canadiens had kicked away a 3-1 series lead. No city is more passionate about its team than Montreal, and goalie Carey Price, who had allowed four goals in both of the previous two games, was either going to be Ken Dryden or left out to dry. (He would be Dryden.)

The ultimate pressure, right?

Maybe not.

How about the threat of being attacked by an angry mob? How about having those peaceful, training roads of Kenya turned into killing fields?

Maybe most fans in New England don't see it this way, but I would argue the most compelling Boston sports figure this week is Cheruiyot. If athletes are to be more than a W or an L, if athletics is to be more than somebody shouting about a point spread, well, the great beauty of sport is that it can help throw the covers off injustice and expose needless violence. It can be an agent of change.

Before the London Marathon, world champion Luke Kibet talked about how on Dec. 30 in his hometown of Eldoret he had stopped to help a man who had been shot and he was struck unconscious when hit by a rock.

"When I was in hospital," Kibet told Reuters, "I was scared. I knew Kenya is now a bad place."

Kibet would count himself as blessed. Lucas Sang, a 1988 track Olympian and an official for the National Association of Kenyan Olympians, was hacked to death and his body burned by a mob that had just killed 50 people in a church.

Wesly Ngetich, who won the Grandma's Marathon in Duluth, Minn., in 2005 and 2007, was killed in January when shot in the chest by an arrow. Ngetich reportedly was trying to mediate a dispute and had just helped an 8-year-old boy who had been hit by an arrow.

The independent International Crisis Group has cited sources that assert that wealthy Kenyan athletes have served as benefactors for militias. Athletics Kenya, the country's sports governing body, has denied the accusations and other neutral observers have suggested that athletes, under duress, may have provided food or transportation but are not involved in fostering violence.

Half of Kenya subsists on less than a dollar a day and it has a fascinating relationship with its elite runners. There is much pride in their performance and, in some cases, much envy of their relative riches.

Former U.N. secretary-general Kofi Annan helped broker a power-sharing deal in February between president Mwai Kibaki and prime minister Raila Odinga, and that has quelled most of the violence. Last week 14 people were killed during a protest, and it remains an uneasy alliance.

Adequate translation remains a problem at Boston Marathon press conferences. The Kenyans also are careful about what they say. Afraid of reprisals? Ordered by authorities who could keep them from going to the Olympics not to say too much? Don't know.

What we do know is on Monday Robert Cheruiyot would hear the Kenyan national anthem played in celebration of his victory.

"I was not thinking about what has happened," Cheruiyot said. "When something happens you have to forget. I just want peace."