IF you want to beat 'em, join 'em.

For years it has been just about impossible for a Caucasian athlete to get past an East African on the track. In only one event, male and female, did Kenyans not occupy the top three places in the rankings coming in here. So it was significant when New Zealander Zane Robertson denied the Kenyans a podium sweep at 5000 metres on Sunday night by grabbing bronze.

It was fulfilment of a prediction made to me by Zane and his twin brother, Jake, when I met them as 17-year-olds in an altitude training camp at 8000 feet in the Rift Valley. A TV reporter described it at the time as a "shit-hole" to the secretary of athletics Kenya.

The Kiwis, of Scottish descent, dropped out of school in Hamilton and have been funded in the camp by their parents for seven years. Quite literally, they went native. Fluent in Kiswahili and Kalenjin, they said: "Not every mzungu [white man] believes the Kenyans are unbeatable."

As we spoke, the smoke rose from their cooking fire with ugali, the Kenyan maize staple, simmering, stirred and spread round the pot with a mweki, a spatulate porridge stick. A second fire cooked sukuma wiki, mixed vegetables. "That is our diet," they told me. "If there was money [which there was not] scraps of goat or chicken might be added."

Clean drinking water was hauled from a bore hole, a cracked 50-litre plastic container spewing water as it was hauled into the evening air. Power cuts, sometimes lasting two days, were common at Kaptagat, barely 15 miles from Eldoret, Kenya's third city.

"Europeans are not achieving because they don't live like this," the told me. "Live a simple life, and when you retire, you can live the good life."

They live as Kenyans, sharing their life and basic diet. Some would have described it as squalor. They said they wished to be "among the best in the world, and we believe this is the way to do it."

Jake added, "I'm not going to sit back and run like a European."