KAPCHORWA, Uganda – With about 1.6km to go in the 2017 World Cross Country Championships, Joshua Cheptegei had one thing on his mind: Win gold for his country on home soil.
It was a balmy afternoon in the Ugandan capital of Kampala and, against a field of far more seasoned athletes, he was closing in on his goal.
Halfway through the biennial event, in which the world’s top distance runners compete over 10km of grass, mud and occasional barriers, he had led with a surge so elegant that it looked like he was floating.
Two hours earlier, compatriot Jacob Kiplimo had hoisted the red, black, gold and grey crowned crane of the Ugandan flag after winning the Under-20 race. The raucous crowd, which included Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni, expected Cheptegei to do the same.
Now he was hanging on for dear life, determined to prove that Uganda, long overlooked in the distance-running world, could hold its own against the sport’s powerhouses, Kenya and Ethiopia.
But the storybook ending, on this day, would not come to pass, with Cheptegei coming in 30th out of 136 finishers.
Cheptegei’s result would nonetheless prove to be a prelude to a Ugandan running renaissance. Two years later, he won the 2019 World Cross Country Championships in Denmark. Uganda’s men took the team title.
Since then, Cheptegei has secured his place on the list of distance-running’s all-time greats, with an Olympic gold medal and another world championship title, as well as world records in the 5,000m and 10,000m.
Kiplimo, who dethroned Cheptegei as the world cross-country champion in February, now holds the half-marathon world record.
In 2019, Halimah Nakaayi won the 800m world title and in 2021, Peruth Chemutai won the Olympic gold medal in the 3,000m steeplechase.
In and around Kapchorwa, a small town in the foothills of Mount Elgon, a 4,300m extinct volcano that straddles the Kenyan border, hundreds of youngsters are hitting the roads with dreams of future glory.
Although Uganda’s volume of talent still lags behind that of Kenya and Ethiopia, the magnitude of its rise has been remarkable.
“Every year, as a country, we’re getting better and better,” Cheptegei said on an April afternoon, as he looked ahead to defending his 10,000m title at this week’s World Athletics Championships in Budapest.
“The Mount Elgon region has always been home to running talent, and we’re only just beginning to showcase it.”
Uganda’s ascent, in many ways, is an outgrowth of long-standing success in Kenya. Since 1964, that country has won 106 Olympic medals in running events from the 400m to the marathon; Kenya has also produced six of the 10 fastest male marathoners in history, and five of the 10 fastest women.
These exploits have been mainly concentrated among the Kalenjin, a community of 11 closely related tribes descended from pastoralists who migrated south over the last few thousand years from the Nile River Valley.
There are Kalenjin in Uganda, too, such as the ancestors of many current athletes, including Cheptegei, Kiplimo and Chemutai.
For Cheptegei, the focus is now on the world championships in Budapest: He is expected to contend for the 10,000m title on Aug 20 and may vie for the podium in the 5,000m as well.
And in December, he will make his marathon debut in Valencia – the same Spanish city where he set his 10,000m record in 2020. Kiplimo has plans to eventually move up to the marathon, too, where the money is greater and new record-breaking opportunities await.
On that day in April, as he spoke from inside his camp after the day’s training session, Cheptegei said he was simply grateful for the journey that he and his country had taken so far – even the rare occasions when things had not quite worked out.
“It’s one of those incidents that built me mentally,” he said of the 2017 race in Kampala. “I had two options: Allow it to break me; or gather myself together and build an inspirational story.” NYTIMES
