ITEN (Kenya): When the Olympic Games start in London Friday, residents of a rural village in western Kenya’s Rift Valley Province will be watching events with more than a cursory look.
Iten, a small settlement built 2,400m above sea level on the escarpment of the Rift Valley’s lush green hills, has acquired a reputation as the base of choice for many of Kenya’s top athletes.
“The local community have gelled with the athletes. It is now a special place for athletics,” said Brother Colm O’Connell, coach to 800m world champion David Rudisha.
On a first visit to Iten, one may be forgiven to think that there is an athletics competition about to take place.
Men and women, dressed in a multitude of sports brands and florescent colours, run from different directions in groups of three to four along the narrow roads.
“This is a place where people have seen the importance of running,” Abel Kirui, double marathon world champion and Kenyan Olympic hopeful, said after a morning jog.
“If you actually happen to go fairly early in the morning when the weather is very fine, you can see people running. They are chasing time, chasing glory.”
It is estimated that around 800 to 1,000 runners live and train in the Iten area. The sport is seen as a way out of poverty in a region where most of the residents are subsistence farmers.
But one of the appeals of Iten is that world champions train with Kenyan youngsters and can be seen running around dusty red roads where many children walk to school barefoot.
Rudisha, Kenya’s most popular athlete, trains with juniors once a week.
“It all latches on to the kids. They see the elite athletes training around the roads and of course more and more are taking it up,” said O’Connell, an Irish missionary who has trained 25 world champions and four Olympic gold medalists during his 36 years in Iten.
Iten initially gained its athletics reputation when St Patrick’s, a boys-only boarding school, and Singore Girls school, produced a host of champion runners.
Women’s 2011 world marathon champion Edna Kiplagat and 2012 London Marathon winner Mary Keitany have built houses in Iten and settled down in the area with their families.
“The (champion athletes) are role models and they are attracting people from all over the country,” added Pieter Langerhorst, Dutch national athletics coach and owner of the High Altitude Training Centre in Iten.
Iten’s fame has now acquired an international dimension with athletes from across the world visiting various training camps in the area to prepare for Olympic Games and other major competitions.
But as Kenyans await the Games in expectation of a record medal haul, athletes like Kirui are adamant neither glory nor wealth will disturb the egalitarian environment in Iten.
“Being humble is part and parcel of our uprising,” he said. (Reuters)