1997 Boston winner Aguta returns
By Pat Butcher
19 April 2000 – Belgrade - Lameck Aguta sat in a downtown Belgrade hotel last Monday watching the Boston Marathon on television with conflicting emotions. "They told me I could go back and run Boston, but there is too much pressure," he said quietly. Instead, he regaled his half dozen companions, who like him are running the Belgrade Marathon on Saturday 22 April, with his inside knowledge of the Boston course.
He has good cause to know it. For Aguta is one of a prodigious decade of Kenyan winners in Boston, his victory coming in 1997. But three months later, his life was in ruins, not from the car crash which only left him with minor injuries, but from the beating by thieves who prey on crash victims, and who left him with brain damage, and unable to run for almost a year.
In July 1997, Aguta was on his way from his Nairobi home to the hotbed of Kenyan athletics in the Western Highlands. His mission was to see his parents, and let them know that his third child, Barbara had been born the previous day. The young driver taking himself and his brother Shem back home didn't know the road, and missed a turn near one of Kenya's biggest towns of Nakuru.
With the quiet gentility characteristic of so many of the Kenyan runners, and so at odds with the story he has to tell, Aguta apologises for not having first hand recall of the events of that day and later. "This is what people have told me. I cannot remember myself. My memory of that time is blank".
When the predators reached his ditched car, and realised they had a celebrity at their mercy, they turned nasty on discovering he did not have at least some of the thousands of dollars he had won in Boston. "They beat me, so I almost died. It's normal in Kenya when there is a car crash". Shem and the driver escaped with minor injuries, and were released from Nakuru hospital within hours. But Aguta had to be airlifted to the same Nairobi Hosital that he had left just 24 hours previously with his wife, Regina and newly born Barbara.
After three months, during which he freely acknowledges that he "talked nonsense," due to his injuries, his then manager Kim McDonald arranged for him to be transferred to a London hospital, which specialised in the re-education of the motor functions damaged in the attack. But Aguta admits he was still so disoriented that he would flee the hospital. "The day before Christmas, I realised I must be with my family. I just went to the airport, bought a ticket and flew to Nairobi. After one week, I realised I was still sick, so I came back".
He finally returned home in February, and began training in April '98, a year after his Boston victory. By January 1999, he went back to San Blas in Puerto Rico, where he had won the half-marathon in 1994. He finished 20th, "next to someone I knew. I was happy, because I still couldn't train like before. I thought, if I'm sick and can finish next to him, I can get back to the top".
Aguta changed management and is now with Luis Posso, whose group includes Olympic champion, Josia Thugwane of South Africa, and recent world record holder, Ronaldo da Costa of Brazil. By August last year, Aguta felt that he was completely fit, and since then, has been training in Nyahururu, formerly Thompsons' Falls, with the group coached by three-time world steeplechase champion, Moses Kiptanui.
"I was going to run a marathon in December, but I didn't think I was ready. It was only at the end of 1999 that I really realised how sick I'd been. I wanted to be sure I could run properly". Aguta claims he is now "100%," but his hesitancy in seeking the right words, even in a foreign tongue, seems to betray a legacy of the blows to the head.
But he hasn't let that affect his ambition. "I have come here to run 2.08, 2.09," he said yesterday in his hotel close to a River Danube, swollen by recent torrential rains in Eastern Europe. The only people likely to stop him are colleagues, Jimmy Muindi, who won Honolulu in December, and Stephen Rugut, who won Carpi, Italy last summer.
And his verdict on this year's Boston? "The Ethiopian (Abere) should have won. But he feared the Kenyans. Even (Elijah) Lagat feared (Moses) Tanui, until he saw that Tanui could not go away with his sprint. One day, I'll go back to Boston. Maybe next year". In the meantime, a Belgrade trying to recuperate from its own blows - last year's race was a victim of the NATO bombing - somehow seems an appropriate place for Aguta to attempt his climb back to the top.
