Maverick Kenyan runner broke four world records while still a student
Henry Rono b February 12, 1952 d February 15,, 2024
Henry Rono, who has died at the age of 72, trained on a diet of beer and cheeseburgers, but over 81 days in 1978 the powerful Kenyan reinvented what was possible in longdistance running.
He was relatively unknown when, on April 8, 1978, at the University of California, Berkeley, Rono won the 5000m in 13min 8.4sec to improve the world record by four and a half seconds. On a windy day in Seattle on May 13, the student at Washington State University won the 3000m steeplechase in 8:05.4, taking more than two and a half seconds off the world record set by the Olympic champion Anders Garderud.
On June 11 in Vienna he ran 27:22.47 to take more than eight seconds off the 10,000m world record held by Samson Kimobwa. At the Bislett Games in Oslo on June 27 he ran 7:32.1 to shave more than three seconds off Brendan Foster’s 3000m world record set four years earlier.
“If anyone had told me that an athlete could run all those races in an eight-week period and with all the travelling involved I would have laughed in their face,” said Foster, who was Britain’s greatest longdistance runner at the time.
Rono’s sequence of 31 races unbeaten stretched into July 1978 when he won gold in the 3000m steeplechase and 10,000m at the All-Africa Games in Algeria, and gold in the 3000m steeplechase and 5000m at the Commonwealth Games in Edmonton, Canada, in August 1978. In the latter race Rono beat Foster to a distant third when he powered ahead with several laps to go. After the race he admitted that he had competed with a hangover after a party in the athletes’ village the night before in which the Kenyan team let off the fire alarm in a neighbouring block occupied by the Scottish team.
If his discipline off the track left much to be desired, Rono’s tactics on it would not be found in any coaching manual and often left other competitors scratching their heads in bemusement, particularly as Rono sprinted round the bends and jogged the straights.
Rono was a shy man whose gap-toothed smile was rarely seen, but he was no respecter of big names, would talk of lowering world records with little apparent hubris and would happily take on anyone and be confident of winning.
Among his greatest scalps during his golden run of victories was destroying Britain’s Steve Ovett, another maverick, in a 3000m race at Crystal Palace.
It was Rono’s great misfortune to be denied a shot at Olympic glory for the 1980 Moscow Games after Kenya joined a boycott in protest at the Soviet Union’s invasion of Afghanistan. By the time Rono graduated in general studies from Washington State University in 1981, the 29-year-old was no longer able to run off his excesses and was noticeably overweight.
Despite that he lowered the 5000m record by more than two seconds to 13:06.2 at a meeting in Knarvik, Norway, in September 1981.
Rono would have been 32 at the Los Angeles Olympics in 1984, still young enough to win the Olympic gold that many felt his talents deserved, but by then his life had imploded. He later relayed a litany of woes. His eldest son, Nixon, had died of brain cancer back in Kenya. He failed in his attempt to apply for a visa for his wife Jennifer and their surviving children, Calvin and Maureen, to join him in America. Then a friend told him that his wife in Nairobi was pregnant. He was perennially in dispute with Kenyan athletics officials and claimed to have been visited by two thuggish men with guns who told him that they were from the mafia and wanted to represent him. Rono said that the stress brought on by all these factors led to him drinking more heavily in 1982.
Lucrative invites to compete at meets in the US and Europe began to dry up after he failed to turn up.
Two attempts at rehab ended with Rono doing what he now did second best after the bottle: running away.
By 1987 Rono had squandered career earnings that he estimated at more than US$1 million. His weight had ballooned to 95kg, but he still attempted several comebacks and harboured dreams of representing Kenya at the Olympic Games in Seoul in 1988.
That dream died completely after he was arrested for a US$300 bank fraud and detained in a New Jersey prison, but the charge was subsequently dismissed. He was now reduced to sleeping in a gutter in an area of Manhattan known as Skid Row. Wearing his tracksuit and running tights to keep out the cold and covering himself with newspapers, he kept his running shoes in a brown paper bag and hugged them close, still hoping that one day he might need them again. Police would regularly move him on, recognise him and slip him a few dollars. When, in desperation, he knocked on the door of the Kenyan embassy in New York, he was told that he was a disgrace to his country, given US$5 and ordered to go away.
Kipwambok “Henry” Rono was born in 1952 in Kiptaragon village, Nandi County, in Kenya’s Rift Valley, an area that had already produced many fine distance runners. However, the child was unable to walk until he was 6 because of an accident when he was an infant. He then lived with his grandmother and spent much of his childhood tending cattle rather than going to school.
He took up running in his late teenage years after listening to a talk given at a local stadium by the great Kenyan runner Kip Keino, the Olympic gold medallist in the 1500m in 1968 and the 3000m steeplechase in 1972. “He lived only three miles away from our village, but I had never met him. I stood by myself above the stadium and watched, wondering how great it was to be an international athlete. From that moment, I made up my mind to run.”
Rono began to train on his own, picking up tips from others who had coaching, but mainly devising his own highly unorthodox regime. Joining the Kenyan army in 1973, he began to compete at meets and was selected for the Kenyan team for the 3000m steeplechase and 5000m for the Montreal Olympics in 1976, before his country boycotted the games in protest at New Zealand’s sporting ties with apartheid South Africa.
That year, at the instigation of Keino, Rono won an athletics scholarship to study at Washington State University, based in the city of Pullman, and he deserted the Kenyan army.
After his “lost decade”, Rono rebuilt his life in the late 1990s and stopped drinking. He found work coaching young athletes and worked as a teaching aide at schools in several US states. “The teaching began in the 1990s, and today I enjoy it much better than the achievement of athletic celebrity,” he said.
He returned to Kenya in 2019 and would tell anybody willing to listen that in beating alcohol he had won the most important race of his life.