Kelvin Kiptum, Kenya’s history-maker whose bright star shone all too briefly

Late last year, in the immediate aftermath of Kelvin Kiptum’s extraordinary exploits on the streets of Chicago, his coach Gervais Hakizimana voiced fears over the new marathon world record holder’s longevity. “He’s training a lot,” warned Hakizimana, explaining how Kiptum would not take a single rest day from running for up to a month at a time.

“At this rate he is in danger of breaking,” he added. “I offered him to slow down the pace but he doesn’t want to. I told him that in five years he’d be done, that he needs to calm down to last in athletics.”

In the wake of the tragic events of last Sunday night, Hakizimana’s words evoke fresh emotions. There is relief that Kiptum capitalised on his prodigious talent in the short time he had, regret that he never managed to share the rewards of his toil with his young family, concern at whether fatigue might have played a part in his demise, and wonder at what more the religious devotion to his craft might have yielded.

Kiptum’s death at the age of 24, in a car crash that also cost Hakizimana his life, robbed the athletics world of one of its finest talents; a history-maker whose star shone almost unfathomably bright for a strikingly short period during which he excelled in a manner like no other.

The brutal nature of marathon running affords no forgiveness for reputation. By default, it requires a well-trodden method of success that has been replicated globally for decades: develop solid foundations over steadily lengthening distances on the track before honing road-running craft through trial and error. Even then, there are no guarantees. Mo Farah, a 10-time global track champion, tasted victory just once during his marathon career and his name does not register among the 100 fastest runners over 26.2 miles. Even the great Eliud Kipchoge took 11 marathons to break the world record.

Kiptum was unique. In little over 10 months from late 2022 to the following winter, he recorded the fastest debut marathon in history, went even quicker to win in London, and then knocked an enormous 34 seconds off Kipchoge’s world record in Chicago. Three marathons, three victories and three of the seven fastest times in history.

Like the four-minute mile before Roger Bannister’s exploits of May 1954, the two-hour marathon has long served as an unreachable limit of human performance. That Kiptum had very real aspirations of becoming the first man to officially achieve it, at his next scheduled outing in Rotterdam in April, showed the sporting outlier he had rapidly become.

With only 36 seconds to find on his previous best, it seemed eminently feasible, and to have done so would have provided him a stature and recognition saved only for a select few sporting greats. Tragically, he is instead destined to forever remain an enigma. Softly spoken, shy and humble in front of the camera, Kiptum’s lack of words and stratospheric trajectory only added to his mystique.

A few years ago, I was fortunate enough to visit Kipchoge’s training camp in Kaptagat, where he lives a monastic, astonishingly simple existence for a sport star of such acclaim. A series of basic single-storey structures with corrugated iron roofs make up the place he calls home for eight months of the year, sharing a male dormitory and communal squat toilets with everyone else.

So sudden was Kiptum’s emergence that similar details of his sanctum are scarce. After his first marathon in 2022, he erroneously suggested he was self-coached, only for it later to emerge that he was in fact operating under Hakizimana. He had first encountered his future coach around the age of 13, when he would follow the Rwandan’s training sessions barefoot after he had finished herding the family’s livestock.

Growing up surrounded by farmland in Chepkorio, Kiptum explained that his immediate focus on the road was purely circumstantial as he could not afford the near 80-mile round trip to the nearest track. After leaving primary school, his father convinced him to begin electrical studies, but he preferred to devote his attention to athletics, intent on becoming the latest Kenyan running prodigy to emerge from the Great Rift Valley.

Moderate success over the half-marathon did little to foretell the prosperity he would enjoy over double the distance. “All he does is run, eat, sleep,” Hakizimana had said of his star athlete. The expectation – as odd as it sounds for someone who had already surpassed every other marathon runner in history – was for this to be his breakout year.

In the next few months, Kiptum would have first attempted to go under two hours in Rotterdam and then take on Kipchoge at the Paris Olympics this summer. That first clash between a marathon legend and a rising star would have been one of the most anticipated road races in history; the immovable object versus the unstoppable force. A changing of the guard seemed likely, but we will never know.

Kipchoge was one of a number of prominent figures to pay tribute to Kiptum after his death, describing him as “an athlete who had a whole life ahead of him to achieve incredible greatness”. The World Athletics president, Sebastian Coe, called him “an incredible athlete leaving an incredible legacy”, while Kenya’s president, William Ruto, said he had “left an extraordinary mark”.

Under Ruto’s express orders, work has this week begun on a building project to rapidly construct a three-bedroom house for Kiptum’s widow, Asenath Rotich, and their two young children on a four-acre site the runner had bought before his death. In a country where distance running is a national obsession, Kiptum was its king-in-waiting, requiring only his profile to grow sufficiently to match his already phenomenally fast times.

Just four days after Kiptum’s death, a nation already in mourning was saddened again when it was announced that Henry Rono had died. In the space of 81 glorious days in 1978, Rono achieved the unparalleled feat of setting 3,000m, 3,000m steeplechase, 5,000m and 10,000m world records, but political boycotts meant he never competed at the Olympics. Like Kiptum, his status was destined never to match his accomplishments; true greats whose legacy is a sense of what should have been.