The secret is not a secret
āIf I had a million dollars I would close this discussion once and for all. I would lay the idea of ānaturalā black athletes to rest. That is not the same as saying that genes are not important, but there is no evidence that exclusive genes have been dished out to specific races.ā
Dr Yannis Pitsiladis, University of Glasgow
A rotund little man stands waiting for me on the red gravel in front of St Patrickās High School. He is wearing a dark knitted jumper even though the midday sun is beating down on us and itās over 30Ā°C. With his ruddy cheeks and a green baseball cap that barely covers the crown of his head, he looks anything but how I had imagined the worldās most successful athletics coach might. Colm OāConnell has agreed to meet me here at the legendary St Patrickās High School in Iten, where everything began for him 35 years previously. In those days he was just a young Irishman whose main enjoyment in life up to that point had been āgetting pissed at Skeffington pubā while he was a student in Galway. It was certainly not on the cards that he would play a central role in the development of the planetās very best middle- and long-distance runners.
When Colm left Ireland for Kenya in February 1976 to teach at an isolated boarding school 2,800 metres up in the Rift Valley, he knew absolutely nothing about running. In fact, he had never attended an athletics meet in his life.
āI was just a geography teacher,ā he says with a shrug as we sit in the St Patrickās school yard chatting in the shade.
Colm OāConnell speaking with the 1,500 metres runner Augustine Kiprono Choge
An entirely new world welcomed Colm OāConnell when he arrived in Kenya. There was no electricity, no telephone service, no tarmac roads and, back then, no reliable running water system. A far cry from the way things had been back in Ireland. By pure chance he became involved in the schoolās newly initiated athletics programme as an assistant coach, although he was in no way qualified in this regard. āI would never have been given the opportunity to become an athletics coach in England or Ireland,ā he is happy to admit.
St Patrickās High School already had proud sporting traditions, especially in volleyball. The schoolās volleyball team did not lose a single match between 1973 and 1988. It took a few years before the schoolās athletics team began to perform properly but when they did, they ran fast. So fast in fact, that managed by Colm OāConnell, they won nineteen out of 21 disciplines at a national athletics meet in 1985. They did not compete in the last two disciplines.
āI learned how to coach through trial and error,ā says Colm. āBecause the boys were boarders at the school I had them at my disposal 24 hours a day. This provided me with excellent conditions when it came to finding out what it took to get them to run fast.ā
The entrance to St Patrickās High School in Iten
Colmās boys were superbly motivated. They had all heard of their countryman, Kipchoge Keino, the first African athlete ever to win the Olympic 1,500 metres gold. (He did so in Mexico in 1968.) Athletics had become professionalised, and the smell of dollars had wafted its way to the Rift Valley. Over the next ten years, Colm OāConnell and St Patrickās High School would pump out one world superstar after the other.
The school yard of legends
Colm points to a tree in the school yard. On it there is a plaque embossed with the name Ibrahim Hussein.
āHe was my first really good athlete,ā he says.
Ibrahim Hussein was a thin lad from the Nandi tribe who came to St Patrickās at the age of fourteen. He later ended up winning the Boston Marathon three times, and was the first African ever to win the New York Marathon.
Three-times Boston Marathon champion, Ibrahim Hussein, has got his own tree at St Patrickās
The whole school yard is full of similar trees with small plaques on their trunks, each bearing the name of a great athlete who started their career at St Patrickās High School. To begin with, they planted a tree every time one of their boys won a medal at the World Championships or the Olympics. However, they soon started to run out of room, and so decided to plant just a single tree for each of the greatest winners.
A couple of metres from Ibrahim Husseinās tree stands the Birir tree. One of OāConnellās Olympic winners, Matthew Birir, brought home gold in the steeplechase at the Barcelona Olympics in 1992. As we walk through the school grounds looking at each tree in turn, I am struck by how unique the environment of St Patrickās must have been in its heyday.
āIt wasnāt just dominance. It was another planet,ā Colm recalls, as he tells me one gripping story after another about his boys. You have to look long and hard to find a prize-winning Kenyan middle-distance runner who has not come into contact with āBrotherā OāConnell during their career. Wilson Kipketer (who, until August 2010, was 800 metres world record holder), Daniel Komen (current 3,000 metres world record holder), Asbel Kiprop, Lydia Cheromei, Susan Chepkemei, Isaac Songok, Linet Masai, Mercy Cherono, Janeth Jepkosgei, David Rudisha ā you name them, Colm has trained them.
As I talk to Colm I have questions queuing up inside my head. I want to understand how it can be that this boarding school with no extraordinary facilities can achieve such staggering results. And the success of St Patrickās High School isnāt where the astonishing facts end. The school is in the part of the Rift Valley that is home to the Kalenjin tribe. They make up 10 per cent of the Kenyan population. Since 1968, when Kenya began to completely dominate the Olympic steeplechase event, only a single non-Kalenjin runner has won the Olympic gold. When this sole non-Kalenjin winner, Julius Kariuki of Nyahururu, also a Kenyan, was asked about this phenomenon he said, āIt is likely that my relatives came from the Kalenjin.ā
But thatās not all. One of the ethnic groups under the Kalenjin tribe is the Nandi people, consisting of some 80,000 individuals. At the 2008 Olympics in Beijing, Nandi runners won the gold in both the menās and the womenās 800 metres ā they also won two silvers and two bronzes! What are the chances of this happening for a tribe consisting of just 80,000 people when competing against the whole of the rest of the world?
The athletic Gold Mine in the Rift Valley is one of the most sensational phenomena in the whole history of sport. Weāre not talking about ice hockey, rugby or baseball, all of which are regionally based sports. We are talking about a global sport, pursued professionally in almost every country in the world, and yet continually conquered by a tiny group of people all living within a 100 kilometre radius.
The running genes myth
The domination of the Kenyan runners is intimidating. In 2011 alone you find a Kenyan beside nineteen of the twenty fastest marathon times. That list includes a new world record, the winning performances from every major city marathon in 2011, and the World Championship marathon win. Not only were all the major city marathons won by Kenyans, but the course records at each were broken in the process.
More than 258 Kenyan marathon runners ran the 44.2 km race in under two hours and fifteen minutes. Britain, with a population twice the size of Kenyaās, delivered only a single performance under that time. The number of top runners in Kenya seems endless, and running is not even the national sport. The runners come from a very small portion of the country where the internal competition is ruthless. This is clearly demonstrated by the case of Luke Kibet ā although four months earlier he had run the eighth fastest time ever in a marathon, and was the defending world champion, he did not qualify for the Kenyan Olympic team for Beijing in 2008. (Though during the very last week before the competition he was taken on as a reserve.)
The kind of world supremacy in running that the Kenyanās enjoy strongly suggests that something more than just hard work is at play. Surely they would not be able to continually deliver the kind of performances they do without some kind of natural genetic advantage?
The same would seem to apply to Ethiopian men, who have won every single gold medal in the 10,000 metres since 1993 or, for that matter, to the West African sprinters responsible for 494 of the best 500 100-metres times ever run. For many years, athletes, scientists and coaches in the West have clung to the explanation that these groups of people must be equipped with special genes, perfectly designed for the specific sport in which they consistently excel.
In their attempt to explain the success of the East African medium- and long-distance runners, scientists have focused, among other things, on the Kenyansā and Ethiopiansā slim calves, which they believe may be advantageous over long distances. But is this enough of an explanation? It certainly isnāt as far as the Jalou ...