Marathon hopeful Zane Robertson found a home in East Africa
LOS ANGELES >> Zane Robertson was just 17 when he and his twin brother Jake, outcast and bullied in their native New Zealand, arrived in Iten in Kenya’s Great Rift Valley in January 2007. They had little money, no place to stay and not much of a plan.
“We had very little of anything,” Zane Robertson recalled Friday.
Even so, the Robertson brothers knew they were in the right place.
On the outskirts of the city, a red arch over the highway greets visitors: “WELCOME TO ITEN HOME OF CHAMPIONS.” A local theater is simply called “Dreams.”
“I felt so at home as soon as we got to Africa,” Robertson said.
Robertson, now 30, should feel equally at home in the lead pack of runners in the Los Angeles Marathon this morning when the 35th edition of the race takes a 26.2mile tour of the city, starting at Dodger Stadium and finishing in Santa Monica, overlooking the Pacific Ocean.
The Robertsons’ 13-year immersion into East Africa’s running culture has shaped them into worldclass runners. In the hills of Kenya and Ethiopia, where Zane Robertson now lives with his wife, Beza, the brothers also found something that eluded them in New Zealand — a sense of belonging. “Home,” Zane Robertson said. Zane Robertson captured a bronze medal at 5,000 meters at the 2014 Commonwealth Games, in 2015 became only the fourth non-african to break an hour in the half-marathon and is considered a contender later this summer for a top-10 finish in the Olympic Games marathon, which could be the deepest field the event’s history. Last July, he broke his brother’s national record in the marathon with a 2-hour, 8-minute, 19-second clocking.
With a victory today, Robertson, who now runs for Asics, would be the first non-african to win the L.A. Marathon since Costa Rica’s Jose Luis Molina took the 1996 race. Robertson expects to have his hands full with Kenyans Elisha Barno and Weldon Kirui, who split the previous four L.A. Marathons, Kirui winning in 2016 and 2018 races, Barno taking the 2017 and 2019 events.
Barno knows better than anyone that though the rolling Los Angeles course is not conducive to world-record times like the Berlin or London races, it can produce high drama. Barno has a history of providing Hollywood endings. In 2017, he waited until the 25th mile to break the race open. A year ago, Barno was so far behind leader John Korir that he literally lost sight of Korir for five miles before overtaking him in the final 200 meters, finishing in 2:11:45.
“L.A. is not about the time,” Barno said Friday. “It’s about the win.”
Win or lose, Zane Robertson plans to stay a few extra days in Los Angeles. He plans to attend the Lakers-brooklyn Nets game on Tuesday at Staples Center. “I’m not a huge fan of runners,” he said, “but I’m huge fan of NBA players.”
His favorite player was Kobe Bryant. Zane Robertson recently had his own brush with near-tragedy when the small car he was riding in was struck by a dump truck in Ethiopia.
“The driver and I both could have been killed,” he said. “That’s how life happens. Everything can change in a second.”
The Robertsons grew up in a working-class family in Hamilton, a city of 165,000 on New Zealand’s North Island.
“We were on the upper side of poor,” Zane Robertson said. “The bottom side of middle class.”
The twins struggled to fit in at school, where they were frequent targets of not only their classmates but their teachers and deans as well.
“The extreme part of the bullying, most of it, was from the teachers,” Zane Robertson said. “We were different, and even when we were 7 years old the teachers would tell the other boys not to hang out with us and then reward them with goody points for it.”
The brothers began running at 14, and within three months both were national champions.
“And we took flight from there,” Zane Robertson said.
New Zealand has a long, rich history in distance running. Arthur Lydiard revolutionized middle and long-distance training globally in the 1960s. Two Lydiard-coached athletes, Peter Snell (800 meters) and Murray Halberg (5,000) won gold medals at the 1960 Olympic Games in Rome. Four years later in Tokyo, Snell swept the Olympic 800 and 1,500 titles, the last man to do so. John Walker, the first man to break 3:50 in the mile, and Dick Quax continued the Kiwi’s world record-setting ways in the 1970s.
“But New Zealand has changed a lot since then,” Zane Robertson said referring to the golden age of the ’60s and ’70s.
The twins’ running success only made them larger targets back home, victims of what is known in New Zealand and Australia as the “tall poppy syndrome,” a cultural tendency to disparage successful or prominent individuals.
“In New Zealand, there’s this mentality to always put down anyone trying to be good,” Zane Robertson said. “So no matter how successful you are, they’re always going to put you down for trying to be good at something. Except rugby.”
And the brothers never were going to be confused for future members of the All Blacks, the country’s world-famous national rugby team and obsession. Zane Robertson recalled how officials at Hamilton Boys’ High School complained that the twins “looked like we were anorexic because we didn’t look like rugby players.
“We were eating the house down. My mother was going broke trying to feed us. We were healthy. We just weren’t muscular like rugby players.”
What the bullies, the critics, couldn’t or wouldn’t see was the strength of their conviction.
“We had so much passion and drive to succeed,” he said.
They were further fueled by the sense of liberation they found in striking out on their own path.
“We just stopped trying to fit in,” he said. “For the first time in our lives, we weren’t trying to be with the cool kids anymore.”
Instead after completing their high school exams they headed to the Rift Valley.
Again they met resistance, one official with the New Zealand federation referring to Africa as a “(expletive) hole” and describing the Robertsons as “little children who didn’t have any idea what they were doing.”
The original plan was to train for three or four months with one of the several world-class training groups in and around Iten and nearby Eldoret as preparation for the World Cross Country Championships in Mombasa.
“But once we got there things went so well we never took the return ticket,” Zane Robertson said.
After an uncertain start, the brothers eventually were taken in by Saif Saaeed Shaheen, who has held the world record in the 3,000-meter steeplechase since 2004. Shaheen grew up in the Rift Valley as Stephen Cherono, setting the world junior record in 2001 and then winning the 2002 Commonwealth Games steeple for Kenya. But he became one of track’s first seven-figure mercenaries a year later, Qatar paying him a reported $1 million to switch citizenship.
Shaheen returned to the Rift Valley after he retired, the Robertsons among a group of young, promising athletes he took under his wing.
“He was like a father figure to us,” Zane Robertson said. “He paid our rent. We all ate together.”
With the help of Shaheen and others in Kenya and later Ethiopia, Zane Robertson initially had success at the shorter distances. In 2014, he ran a 3:53.72 mile in Dublin and then followed up his Commonwealth Games 5,000 bronze with a silver medal in the Continental (previously World) Cup a few weeks later.
He broke Quax’s 39-year-old national record in the 10,000 meters, running in a time of 27:33.67 to place 12th at the 2016 Olympic Games.
In 2015, a year after Robertson’s Commonwealth Game success, the same New Zealand official who mocked their decision to relocate in East Africa sent the brothers a message through an intermediary: “Tell the boys I’m sorry. They sure proved me wrong.”
Zane Robertson has never returned to Hamilton Boys’ High School. But on his way back to Ethiopia, he plans to take a detour to New Zealand for a bit of vacation and is considering stopping by his old school.
“When I pass through I’d like to see some of the deans and teachers who are still there,” he said before considering what he would say to them. “What you did to me wasn’t fair, but I’d like to thank you because it made me who I am today.”