http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/04/17/why-were-two-female-olympians-killed-in-kenya

Why Were Two Female Running Champions Killed in Kenya?

Iten, a small town in the Great Rift Valley, became the long-distance-running capital of the world. Then, within a span of six months, two élite athletes were found dead.

By Alexis Okeowo, published April 10, 2023

When Agnes Tirop was eleven, she was already as fast as athletes twice her age. “She loved running, and she shined,” her brother Martin told me. Tirop, who was born in 1995, was small-boned and delicate-featured, with cropped hair. Even as a child, she was self-possessed, with a singular focus on improving her speed. She grew up in the Kenyan village of Nandi, in the Great Rift Valley, a four-thousand-mile-long volcanic trench of steep escarpments, green hills, and soda lakes that is visible from space. She came from a big family. Her father, Vincent, had been a long-distance runner in his youth—as had her grandfather—but Vincent found it difficult to earn a living from the sport. Instead, each day he bought milk from local farmers and took it by bicycle to sell at the market in the city of Eldoret, twenty-nine miles away. The family waited, sometimes until midnight, for him to bring home food for them to eat. Despite having little money, Vincent saved five litres of milk every week for his children, so that they would have the nutrition they needed in order to train. “We were dirt poor,” Martin said. “We started running because of poverty.”

Several of the children showed an early aptitude for the sport, but it was clear that Tirop was special. She began training in primary school, running barefoot on the roads in her village. Joan Chelimo, who trained with Tirop, said that she always wanted to put on bouncy Kalenjin music before practice. “She was very young, and she was beating senior athletes,” Chelimo said. At fifteen, Tirop won the five-thousand-metre race at a national junior competition. Later that year, she flew to South Africa for an international junior race, and came in second. When she returned home, her family threw her a party, serving meat and rice and playing music for hours. “It was her first time out of the country, and we felt very happy and proud,” Vincent said. Tirop soon started giving some of her winnings to her family, so that they could build a house. “She paid for my school fees—and I’m older than her!” Martin said.

The Great Rift Valley in Kenya—and particularly a small town called Iten, two hours from Nandi—has become, by some measures, the running capital of the world. Iten, like many villages in the area, sits in the mountains, almost eight thousand feet above sea level, but you can descend four thousand feet into the valley by car within half an hour. Athletes there can “live high and train low,” spending their non-training days at altitude so that their lungs become more efficient but running at a lower elevation, where the air is more oxygen-rich. Kenya has won more élite marathons than any other country in the past twenty years, and many of its winners have come from the Great Rift Valley. After Ibrahim Hussein, who was from Iten, became the first African to win the New York City Marathon, in 1987, the town’s reputation was cemented. A sign above the main road welcomes visitors to the “home of champions.” Kenya’s best athletes now train in the area, including the world’s most decorated living marathoner, Eliud Kipchoge. The Japanese, French, British, and Americans have sent runners to train there. “Iten is the nerve center,” Vincent Onywera, who teaches exercise and sports science at Kenya College of Accountancy University, in Nairobi, told me.

[click thru using the URL above to read the rest of this lengthy and disturbing article]