HE LIT UP
THE BEIJING OLYMPICS LIKE A LIGHTNING BOLT, dazzling us with his exuberance and speed. He ran like a man who didn’t know what caution was. He ran joyfully, recklessly, brimming over with cheerful self-belief. You think I’m talking about Usain Bolt? Think again. For connoisseurs of the runner’s art, the real sensation of the Games was Sammy Wanjiru.
He was the marathon runner who ran without fear: a 21-year-old who loved to run fast. He loved to live fast, too. That was part of his charm. Sadly, it was also how he died.
For a couple of years following that dramatic race in August 2008, he was a superstar. Yet who now remembers the fearless exuberance of Sammy Wanjiru’s running? His achievements in life remain obscured by the still-only-half-explained tragedy of his death. When his name comes up, it always does so with that bleak ending attached. His racing triumphs are an afterthought.
He deserves better. His performance on the final day of the 2008 Summer Olympics verged on the miraculous, overturning conventional racing wisdom and leading David Bedford, former 10,000m world record-holder and organiser of the London Marathon, to describe Wanjiru afterwards as ‘instantly the best and most exciting marathon runner in the world, maybe ever’. It is worth reminding ourselves why. It was a hot day, rising beyond 30C by the later stages of the race, despite the early start. It was also a humid day. Worse: it was a Beijing day. The Chinese authorities had made belated efforts to ease air pollution by closing factories and restricting traffic, but the capital was still smothered by much of its usual photochemical smog. The Bird’s Nest stadium had been barely visible at times, and Western spectators had been warned to ‘limit or avoid’ outdoor exercise. Visitors complained of itching eyes, tickling coughs and a strange metallic taste in the air. In terms of particulate levels, it was twice as bad as Athens in 2004, and that had been pretty bad. Haile Gebrselassie, the world record-holder, had pulled out of the marathon in March, citing concerns about his health. Others decided that the prize was worth the risk – but they knew that they were playing for higher stakes than usual.
Ninety-eight men set off from Tiananmen Square at 7:30am. A dozen or more were theoretically capable of winning. Wanjiru’s fellow Kenyan, Martin Lel, was the slight favourite. Five months earlier, he had won the London Marathon for the third time, finishing within a minute of a world record; he also had two New York City Marathon victories under his belt. Deriba Merga, the
Ethiopian, and Jaouad Gharib, Morocco’s world champion from 2003 and 2005, were also fancied; as was Kenya’s Luke Kibet, the current world champion.
Several pundits suggested that Wanjiru, second in London, was worth keeping an eye on; but Eritrea’s Yared Asmerom could not be ruled out, either, and nor could Ethiopia’s Tsegaye Kebede, winner of the Paris Marathon. In short, it was an open race. But there was one thing the experts agreed on: the early stages would be cautious.
By 7:32am, you could sense that something odd was happening. Wanjiru was trying to burn off his rivals from the start. Some, such as Team GB’s Dan Robinson, held back deliberately, certain that Wanjiru and any who followed him would soon pay a price. Wanjiru was more concerned with what others would pay. He wanted to make the fast finishers suffer, fearing that, if he didn’t, they would out-kick him later. Apart from that, he didn’t seem afraid at all.
He went through 5km in 14:52, an optimistic speed at the best of times and seemingly suicidal in these gruelling conditions. Back in Paavo Nurmi’s day, you could have won Olympic gold with that kind of pace – in the 5000m itself. Already, the leading pack was down to 12.
For those who understood what they were watching, it already felt like one of those outrageous sporting gambles that become – on the rare occasions when they pay off – the stuff of legend. Think of Muhammad Ali leaning back on the ropes in the Rumble in the Jungle in 1974; or Philippe Saint-André setting off from the French goal-line to begin the ‘try from the end of the world’ against the All Blacks in 1994; or Ben Stokes pivoting an Ashes series with a storm of wild hitting in 2019. At first, you think the person in question has gone mad. Then you think: hang on, this is special. And, if there’s time, you call your friends or family to make sure they’re watching.
In fact, it had been obvious for a long time that Wanjiru was one to watch. His choice of this particular occasion for rewriting the rules of marathon running was unexpected, but he had been promising something remarkable for a while. With hindsight, most of his life’s journey had prepared him for this race.
He was born on November 10, 1986, in a mud hut in Githunguri, a highland village near Nyahururu, in Kenya’s Rift Valley. His early years were harsh. His mother, Hannah, was often away working, leaving young Sammy and his brother to be raised by grandparents. He never knowingly met his father. What little schooling he got petered out when he was 12. A year or so later, he got his first pair of shoes.
EYES ON THE PRIZE
LONG BEFORE THAT, HE HAD CHOSEN HIS PATH. He started running when he was eight and became a regular on the track in Nyahururu’s municipal stadium. His precocious gifts attracted the attention of talent scouts and he realised that running offered an escape route from a default destiny of lifelong poverty.
When he was 16, a selection race won him a scholarship to go to Sendai Ikue High School in northern Japan, where he spent much of each year from 2003 onwards. He graduated in March 2005 and began to run for the Toyota Kyushu Ekiden team, with Koichi Morishita, silver medallist in the 1992 Olympic marathon, as his coach. His progress was fast. That year, aged 18, he won a string of races in Japan, set a world junior record at 10,000m in Brussels and broke Paul Tergat’s half-marathon world record in Rotterdam.
Even then, however, his brilliance was erratic. He lost his world record and for around a year achieved little of note. He seemed unsettled in Japan, disliking the climate and pining for female company – which seems to have meant mainly, but not exclusively, his wife, Terezah Njeri, a Nyahururu girl he had married in 2005. He also discovered the consolations of alcohol. Then, in a six-week burst of brilliance in early 2007, he reclaimed the half-marathon record and then broke it again. He started that October’s world road-running championships as overwhelming favourite – and finished 51st.
The most perceptive observers weren’t sure what to make of him. In December 2007, he ran and won his first marathon, in Fukuoka, Japan, in a spectacular debut time of 2:06:39. Four months later, the slightly built Wanjiru hung on gamely behind Lel to come second•
…
IN A SIX-WEEK BURST OF
BRILLIANCE IN EARLY
2007, HE RECLAIMED THE
HALF-MARATHON RECORD
AND THEN BROKE IT AGAIN
in the London Marathon in 2:05:24, trimming his PB by 75 seconds. He was obviously a champion in the making, but common sense suggested that perhaps this young man needed to grow up a little if he was to achieve his full potential.
But Wanjiru didn’t really do common sense. He didn’t do patience, either. When he wanted something, he wanted it now; and what he wanted in August 2008 was Olympic gold. No Kenyan had ever won an Olympic marathon – an extraordinary failure, given the nation’s wider dominance of the distance. It rankled: Ethiopia had won five. If Wanjiru could break the jinx, the glory back in his homeland would be beyond his wildest imaginings.
Actually, he had even higher ambitions. He felt that he, Lel and Kibet could achieve a Kenyan 1-2-3. With that in mind, he shared his plan with them before the start. But knowing what’s to come doesn’t make every ordeal easier; it certainly didn’t in this case. For Lel and Kibet, it would be a painful morning.
SURGE AND DESTROY WANJIRU LED THEM OFF LIKE A STARTLED CAT. The first 10 kilometres were his fastest of the race: he polished them off in 29:26. (Sixty years earlier, that would have been a world record for 10,000m.) Lel helped with the pace-making and the other leading Africans seemed happy to embrace the sub-three-minute kilometres. If nothing else, they could shake off a few Europeans and Americans.
In fact, it was Spain’s Jose Manuel Martinez who led as they passed the 10km mark, with Merga, Lel and Asmerom on his shoulder. But it was Wanjiru, perhaps a second behind them, who was in control, and pretty soon he was pressing again. As he later explained, ‘Whenever I realised that one athlete was able to live with my pace, I made another kick to leave him behind.’
The leading pack was already down to eight: Martinez, Merga, Lel, Asmerom, Wanjiru, Gharib, Kibet and Kifle. If they kept this up, they were on schedule for a sub-2:07 time, and the other 90 runners might as well go home. It was a big ‘if’, however. A year earlier, Kibet had won the world championships in Osaka in vaguely comparable conditions (equally humid, less polluted, a few degrees hotter). His time had been 2:15:59. That was how marathons were supposed to be won in tough conditions. No wonder commentators were reaching for words such as ‘suicidal’ and ‘insane’. Yet the Kenyan front-runners knew what they were doing.
As the runners sped through the stifling Beijing morning, Wanjiru looked cheerful and relaxed, as did Gharib beside him. But
Kibet, the third Kenyan in the group, was already starting to suffer in seventh place. The conditions really were as difficult as they looked.
In fact, the pace had eased a bit coming up to 15km, so Wanjiru upped it again between 15km and 20km. That 5km section was his fastest single stretch – 14:33 – and included a particularly aggressive spurt around 16km. He passed 20km in 59:10. By then, the leading eight had been reduced to five: Merga, Kifle, Lel, Gharib and Wanjiru. For now, they were too tightly bunched to separate; Merga and Kifle were doing much of the pacemaking, with Wanjiru happy to run in their slipstream when he could. What he wasn’t prepared to do was allow the pace to ease. ‘I had to push the pace,’ he explained later, ‘because my body gets tired when I slow down.’
Kibet, in sixth place, was 14 seconds back, with the next group a further nine seconds behind him. But the clock told only part of the story. The narrative that mattered could be seen in the drawn faces of most of the leading runners and the optimistic grin that flashed from time to time across Wanjiru’s features.
The front five passed halfway in 1:02:34. (Thirty years earlier, that would have smashed the half-marathon world record.) The next three men (Kebede, Asmerom and Kibet) were 14 or 15 seconds behind and showed little appetite for closing the gap.
Instead, the gap widened. By 25km, it was 45 seconds. Kebede, who was leading the•
chasing group, was fading. Meanwhile, even the front-runners were showing signs of cracking. Merga and Wanjiru continued to force the pace, while Merga, sometimes helped by Kifle, made repeated surges. Wanjiru seemed to take it all in his stride. Gharib sometimes seemed to be slipping back but repeatedly forced his way into contention. By the time they reached 30km, on the other hand, both Lel and Kifle were weakening.
Merga and Wanjiru passed 30km together in 1:29:14. Gharib was just in touch, four seconds behind. The others appeared to have missed their chance. At around 31km, as they passed Tsinghua University, Wanjiru looked around and appeared to see clearly that there were no obvious threats beyond the leading three. A broad, confident smile lit up his face: he was going to be an Olympic medallist.
Now it was just a question of who wanted gold most. Even Wanjiru must have been suffering by now. But he also knew that, if he seized this moment, all his life’s suffering – all the training, all the homesickness, all the poverty – would have been worth it. This was the hour of his destiny.
DESTINY CALLS
IT WAS 9AM. THE TEMPERATURE WAS APPROACHING 30C. All three men kept up their relentless rhythm, seemingly indifferent to the stifling air. Then, at 38km, Wanjiru missed his bottle. It was the kind of small mistake that can make a devastating difference in such extreme circumstances, and Wanjiru must have felt a lurching sense of doubt. But Merga, who had seen what happened, made no attempt to capitalise on his rival’s misfortune. Instead, from a pace behind, he thrust forward his own bottle. Wanjiru swigged gratefully, returned it and waved his gratitude. Merga muttered something, apparently conveying that his bolt was shot and that Wanjiru should go for it. Which is what Wanjiru did.
By 40km (passed in 1:59:54), he had built up an 18-second lead. Gharib still seemed to believe that there was something to fight for; Merga, on the other hand, was slowing. Far behind, Lel was grimly hanging on, Kifle was going backwards and Kebede, who had overtaken both, was gradually trying to close a 40-second gap between fourth and third.
But Wanjiru was beyond caring about such details. He knew now that he simply had to keep on doing what he had been doing all morning: banging out those sub-three-minute kilometres. In contrast to all the other leading runners, he slowed only marginally in the second half of the race. The average positive split for nine of the top 10 finishers was +4:03. But Wanjiru’s positive split was just +1:24.
When he finally entered the Bird’s Nest stadium, he smiled broadly and waved repeatedly. His manner seemed so relaxed at first that it was hard not to glance anxiously at the entrance for pursuers. Then, somewhere in the back straight, he began to sprint, apparently for no other reason than because he could. With 26 gruelling miles behind him, his movements were still as fast and fluid as a waterfall. If he hadn’t been smiling so broadly, you’d have thought he was running for his life.
Gharib entered the stadium more than 40 seconds behind. By then, Wanjiru was flying down the home straight. He reached the tape in 2:06:32 – beating the Olympic record by almost three minutes. A smile of pure, boyish joy lit up his face as he stopped and drew breath. Then he made the sign of the cross and dropped to his knees to give thanks.
While he did so, Gharib reached the line, with a time of 2:07:16. By the time Kebede joined them, three and a half minutes behind the winner, Wanjiru was back on his feet. Merga missed out on bronze by 21 seconds. Lel finished fifth and was quick to join in the celebrations; Kibet failed to finish.
Wanjiru was a popular winner, even among his nonKenyan rivals. But his victory meant most to his fellow countrymen. Fifty years of hurt (since Kanuti Sum first tried to win an Olympic marathon in 1956) were over. Wanjiru told a reporter, ‘The gold may have been won by Wanjiru, but the glory and honour goes to the country as a whole.’
He was wrong, though. This was a unique performance by an extraordinary athlete. His time was within a couple of minutes of Gebrselassie’s world record – in conditions that could hardly have been less conducive to fast-marathon running. That made it one of the greatest feats at that distance the world had seen. And for Wanjiru, of course, it meant something else, too. The barefooted boy who had grown up in a mud hut in Githunguri need never be poor again. His was the last of the 958 medals presented at the Games. Perhaps no athlete had come so far to get to the podium, or produced such a stunningly brave performance to ensure that the medal they hung round his neck was gold.
That wasn’t the end of it. It never is, with Olympic gold. In Wanjiru’s case, however, there were two after-stories. One was the kind of narrative you would have hoped for. The dazzling athlete who had pushed back the boundaries of the possible in Beijing went on to promise more. He spoke of a world-record attempt later in the year and even shared his
long-term aspiration to break the two-hour barrier. Meanwhile, he won the London and Chicago marathons in 2009, setting course records for both – and winning the World Marathon Majors jackpot of $500,000.
THINGS FALL APART THEREIN LAY THE SEEDS OF THE OTHER after-story: the one that everyone remembers. Between 2005 and 2011, Wanjiru earned an estimated $8m from his running. He spent it, mostly, in Kenya, with the same joyful abandon that characterised his running. At first, he gave large sums to his mother and to the children’s home where she worked. He built her a house in Nyahururu, with another nearby for him and his wife. He supported other children’s homes, worked with charities such as WaterAid and paid for promising children to go to school. Mostly, though, like George Best before him, he spent his money on booze and women – and wasted the rest.
His generosity attracted a leech-like entourage. Men claiming to be his father kept appearing. So did women offering to join in his rather loose domestic arrangements. His taste for alcohol grew thirstier.
His physical condition deteriorated, yet he remained capable of occasional breathtaking performances. Some argue that the 2010
Chicago Marathon, though not his fastest race, was his finest. There may never have been such an agonisingly dramatic final mile, with Wanjiru refusing to accept that Kebede had broken him. But there was something tragic as well as awe-inspiring about Wanjiru’s lastgasp victory. Like Ali in the Thriller in Manila, or Elvis in his final concerts, he was visibly past his best and dredged his triumph from memory. It’s hard to avoid the thought that he did so because he needed the prize money.
Back in Kenya, his life was unravelling. His drinking and womanising had strained his marriage to breaking point; his mother and his wife loathed one another. In December 2010, Wanjiru was charged with threatening his wife with an AK-47 rifle. Terezah later withdrew the accusation, but the charge of illegally possessing the AK-47 hung over him. Meanwhile, he was lucky to emerge relatively unscathed from a car crash in January 2011.
Mystery surrounds the last night of his life, on May 15, 2011. A rough consensus suggests that, following a drinking session, Wanjiru returned to his home with a woman who was not his wife, then passed out in bed. His wife returned and, following a row, locked him in the bedroom. Wanjiru tried to escape via the balcony but slipped and fell to his death.
All sorts of lurid variations to this narrative have been suggested, including suicide and murder. They hardly seem necessary. The salient points of Wanjiru’s life are beyond dispute. He was a runner of spectacular potential who was profligate with his talent, his love, his well-being and, most dangerously, with his money. Perhaps he had it in him to become the greatest marathon runner of all time. Instead, at the age of just 24, he was gone. But he left us with what may have been the greatest Olympic marathon of them all.
…
WANJIRU KNEW THAT IF
HE SEIZED THIS MOMENT,
ALL HIS LIFE’S SUFFERING
WOULD HAVE BEEN
WORTH IT
Richard Askwith is author of Feet in the Clouds, Running Free and Today We Die A Little: Zátopek, Olympic Legend to Cold War Hero