Former Steeple Great Wilson Boit Now A Marathoner
Posted Friday, 26 October, 2007
For a man who says he’ll be happy if he runs 2hr 12min in the Frankfurt Marathon on Sunday, to suggest that he can challenge Haile Gebrselassie’s new world record of 2.04.26, you might think it’s time to call for the guys in the white coats. But when that man is Wilson Boit Kipketer, one of that select band who has run under eight minutes for the toughest event on the track, the steeplechase, then he is at least worth an audition.
That’s not the half of it. Ten years at the top of international track and field have lent Boit Kipketer a level of wit and sophistication that we do not readily associate with Kenyan athletes. Which is not to criticise, merely to point out that the najority of Kenyan runners come from rural communities, and tend to be shy of what we might call first-world modes of communication, whose most extreme form is, in common parlance, ‘attitude’. Boit Kipketer has it in spades. When I remark that, at 35, he is a similar age to Gebrselassie, he shoots back, “You can’t believe that Ethiopian calendar. It’s different from everyone else’s”. Which is true. The Ethiopians have just celebrated the start of the Third Millenium. But when he quickly adds, “Gebrselassie is really 40 years old,” he has us hanging on every word.
Even the riposte that 2.04.26 ain’t bad for a 40 year old gets short shrift. “The older you get, the better you can cope. If a young man ran 2.04.26, he’d never come back from that, but when you’re mature, you know what to do. When you can run 2.35 over barriers (ie in the ‘chase), three minutes (top marathon pace) is no problem”.
Maybe it’s because he comes from a family of 12 children that explains his loquaciousness. As my own father, who was one of nine, used to say, “You had to fight for your space, to make yourself heard”. As the expression goes, Boit Kipketer is not slow in coming forward. But he was certainly so at the start of his career.
We have come to expect the extraordinary from East African athletes, but even by Kenyan standards, Boit Kipketer’s rise was remarkable. If only for the fact that so little was expected of him. As a junior at the famous St Patrick’s School in Iten, coach Bro Colm O’Connell recalled, “He never went beyond district championships. When I look back now, I smile about it. I put him pacesetting for the girls. Little did I know that within another five years, Wilson Boit Kipketer would win the world title in the steeplechase and go on to break the world record”.
That world title came in Athens, in early August 1997, and the record came a week later in Zurich, in one of the greatest steeples of all time. Races nowadays tend to be runaways, but when Boit Kipketer ran his record 7.59.08, to become the second man under eight minutes, he did it in a race where Bernard Barmasai was second in 8.00.35, and Moses Kiptanui, who had led the charge under eight minutes, was third in 8.00.78.
Boit Kipketer was an equally close second to yet another colleague, Reuben Kosgei in the Olympic Games in 2000, but the injuries that are endemic in such an event had alrady started to take their toll. “It’s the hardest race on the track, and the most technical after the 110 metres hurdles,” says Boit Kipketer. “There’s always some sort of injury. It was my ankle in 1997, then a back problem in 1998, then a hamstring. I was in good shape in 2001, but I hit a barrier in Zurich, and hurt my toes. It’s hard to come back from a bad injury, look at Kiptanui, look at Barmasai. I decided to stop in 2003, 2004, and change my speciality, turn to the marathon to finish my career.
“I think if you’re a natural athlete like me, you can do any event, from 800 metres right up to the marathon. It’s just a matter of changing your training – mileage, concentration. Most of my steeplechase career, I was without a coach. With the marathon, I’ve just followed the other guys (he indicates training partners, Wilfred Kigen and Vincent Kipsos). The biggest problem is the mind. A lot of guys lack something in their mind”.
And that, surprisingly is what seems to worry Boit Kipketer. His debut in Dusseldorf, in 2.15.23 hardly set the marathon world on fire. Indeed, it wouldn’t even feature in the top 100 in his home town of Eldoret. “I trained for a whole year, from 2005, for the marathon, but I didn’t race. I was still doubting myself. But my injuries are 75% healed, and my training is 90%. I don’t need to work on my speed, that’s already in place. I need to improve from 2.15. I’ll go for around 2.12, and then think about 2.07 next time. If I can put in the miles, I don’t see why I can’t do what Gebrselassie is doing. But even 2.06 would be enough”.
He has just described a similar career arc to the one he had in the steeplechase, and if Wilson Boit Kipketer can do that, then maybe he can make as much impact on the marathon as he once did over the barriers.
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