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."
Why are you making commenting on The Herald only available to subscribers?
It should have been a safe space for informed debate, somewhere for readers to discuss issues around the biggest stories of the day, but all too often the below the line comments on most websites have become bogged down by off-topic discussions and abuse.
heraldscotland.com is tackling this problem by allowing only subscribers to comment.
We are doing this to improve the experience for our loyal readers and we believe it will reduce the ability of trolls and troublemakers, who occasionally find their way onto our site, to abuse our journalists and readers. We also hope it will help the comments section fulfil its promise as a part of Scotland's conversation with itself.
We are lucky at The Herald. We are read by an informed, educated readership who can add their knowledge and insights to our stories.
That is invaluable.
We are making the subscriber-only change to support our valued readers, who tell us they don't want the site cluttered up with irrelevant comments, untruths and abuse.
In the past, the journalist’s job was to collect and distribute information to the audience. Technology means that readers can shape a discussion. We look forward to hearing from you on heraldscotland.com
Comments & Moderation
Readers’ comments: You are personally liable for the content of any comments you upload to this website, so please act responsibly. We do not pre-moderate or monitor readers’ comments appearing on our websites, but we do post-moderate in response to complaints we receive or otherwise when a potential problem comes to our attention. You can make a complaint by using the ‘report this post’ link . We may then apply our discretion under the user terms to amend or delete comments.
Post moderation is undertaken full-time 9am-6pm on weekdays, and on a part-time basis outwith those hours.
Read the rules hereComments are closed on this article