Trevor Frecknall for IAAF
13 April 2000 - If Joyce Chepchumba had a Kenyan shilling for every time she’s been asked about her record earnings from last year’s Flora London Marathon, she’d probably be twice as rich now.
Not that it bothers this former postwoman who used to earn 10,000 Kenyan shillings a year (you can buy a £ with 116.5 of them). She’s still laughing all the way to the bank. Because she swears she hasn’t spent any of the London loot however much it was. Some said she carried off $330,000 including the $125,000 bonus the organisers gave her for running a world best for a women-only race. Others inflated it to as much as $500,000. All of which makes this delightful 29-year-old giggle like a schoolgirl, hiding her face in her hands.
Either way, it was the most ever earned by a woman for a single race, so how much was it Joyce?
She emerges from behind her hands, suddenly serious, eyes wide and innocent. "It was 230,000 dollars after deductions," she says. Deductions? "Tax and so on."
Before this mere journalist’s calculator operator can work out that, as you can buy a £ with 116.5 Kenyan shillings or 1.6-ish US dollars, she took home 16,741,125 Kenyan shillings for last year’s win, she’s ahead of the game because she’s played it so many times with so many other prying journalists and plain nosy folk over the past twelve months.
And before I can ask, she giggles: "I haven’t spent any of it. It’s all in the bank. I have no time. At this time I am still concentrating on running. For money like that, you need to plan something. If it’s a house, you need to decide where you want it, what you want in it. If it’s a farm, you need to look around."
And she simply does not have time to stop, think and look around. She is so busy keeping up with running ambitions, that arrived later in life than is the case with most athletes, but burn no less intensely, especially in Olympic year; and, above all, because she’s happy with a life that leaves her with three - or maybe four - countries she can call home. As we talk in an athletes’ house in Kingston found for her by John Gladwin of Nike on a flying PR visit for a weekend last month, she is based in Germany. If our discussion had been a week earlier, she’d have been in Portugal. After London, she will go home for May and June to her eight-year-old son Collins Kipngetich, who is now in class two and, she can confirm from her nightly telephone conversations, "is learning English very well." Chepchumba realises this is important: Kenyans grow up learning their mother tongue (local dialect - Kipsigis in her case) and national language, Swahili, while they are taught English in school. While she is not going to language school in Germany where she finds "the grammar is a bit difficult," she’s learning as she shops in her European base - which is just as well. For in July she will return to Germany to prepare for another marathon in August or September or October - "maybe in America again or [her smile brightens and her eyes shine as the Olympic torch shimmers in her mind] maybe somewhere else this year. " November and December she will spend back home. Then in January, February and March, she will be back in Germany preparing for a spring marathon.
Except when it’s cold. Then she and her four flatmates leave the small town of Detmold for the kinder climate of the Algarve and the athletics population of Portugal, accustomed as it is to the sight of its national squad working as a unit, is treated to the mind boggling spectacle of the two most successful marathon women in the world sharing life. For one of Joyce Chepchumba’s flatmates is her biggest rival and her greatest friend.
The prospect of her and Tegla Loroupe racing neck and neck along Birdcage Walk and round past Buckingham Palace on April 16, finally settling the outcome with the kind of last ditch effort with which she unforgettably defeated Liz McColgan by a stride in 1997, has persuaded the London Marathon organisers to return to their insurers and offer record purses. Yet you get the impression Chepchumba would do it for the laughs. After all, she and Loroupe both downed postbags in 1993 to pursue their love of running ... and all that’s for certain in Marathon Week is that they won’t understand what all the fuss is about when folk start to build up a rivalry. Because they share everything: cooking (they’ve even found a shop in Detmold that sells ugali, the Kenyan meal which is the staple diet of all of the country’s runners), washing and other household chores, manager and coach (Volker Wagner), even training schedules. They have known each other since 1990, working together in the post office. For three years, they sorted the letters, weighed the parcels, sold the stamps ... and shared a love of running.
Chepchumba recalls: "I’d been running in school and, by the time I left when I was 19, I was running 10,000 metres. But only for school and for the province."
She adds: "At the post office we worked from seven or eight in the morning until five at night so it was very hard to concentrate on sports. So I decided I had better run. I thought, ‘I cannot stop. I enjoy it too much.’ When you are training for long distance, you need time." So when her friend Tegla finished 80th - yes, 80th - in the women’s 6350 metres race at the 1993 World Cross Country Championships, it provided the incentive for them to set off in pursuit of their dream. "I was just a normal person," says Chepchumba, curling up again on a settee, head resting on her knee, mind drifting through the seven heavenly years. "We are getting a lot of money now."
And working for it. The day after they returned to Germany from Portugal last month, the training schedule called for a 15x1km session. It was snowing. So Chepchumba went to the indoor track and did the entire session there. Alone. "I started with 3:13, finished with 3:02 and did all the rest in between those times," she says. "With not long rests." Twenty-four hours later, she’s in Richmond Park, training with a distinguished group put together by Nike’s John Gladwin - Great Britain cross country team manager Dave Clarke and Richard Xerri, the Hercules Wimbledon athlete who’s an invaluable physio to countless athletes. They run around the perimeter of the royal park for 80 minutes at seven-minute mile pace; and the Kenyan who has finished second, first, third and first in the last four Londons is not recognised by a single one of the hordes of all standards training in one of the capital’s favourite haunts for runners. It could be because she’s wrapped so comprehensively in wetsuit and uncountable other layers to protect her from the chill wind, or because the sun is too bright for spies to focus on her, or simply because the natural contours and beauty of the park encourage minds to close to every sensation but self-indulgence. Either way, she relishes being "a normal person" again. Yet while she stretches and bathes afterwards, Clarke says: "She was so easy, she could do it again." Which is just as well: as Chepchumba settles down with a good old cup of tea, she talks about going out again in the afternoon - and going further on the Sunday. She puts it like this: "Let’s say I was supposed to do 1:15 in the morning and 1:15 in the evening and tomorrow two hours."
She certainly enjoys the long stuff more than the shorter efforts - though she confesses that earlier this winter she raced twice indoors over 5000 metres. She laughs so roundly, she almost rolls off the settee. "It was so funny for me. You run round so many times, you get crazy. Ugh! "I did the first one in 16:09 which was good for me. Then the last one I ran 16:19. I was almost the last. I ran faster but I could not catch up with the people who are used to running track."
During the month in Portugal, she ran a couple of 6km cross country races at Vilamoura. "In the first one, I was number 15 - that was good. The second one, I was number seven - but I don’t think the opposition was so good." From which you’ll gather she’d win a gold medal at self-deprecation.
But she was not tempted to rush home for Kenya’s World Championships trials. "It’s not possible to combine road and cross. We have very good runners. And every year we have new runners - three or four - to make it more difficult. In the marathon now, we have maybe five women under 2:30." So Chepchumba stuck to the marathon build-up that has worked well over the past couple of years: a 20km in Holland on March 12 and, two weeks before London, the Berlin Half-marathon (while Loroupe goes to the Lisbon Half). Which brings us to the inevitable question: Do they avoid racing against each other because they such friends?
The thought evokes another bout of laughter. "We like to race each other," Chepchumba pledges. "Our manager likes us to go to different competitions. We ran together two times in New York but at that time I was not in shape to run fast."
The last time they raced each other, it was Loroupe who was not in best shape. Chepchumba won the Great North Run with Loroupe 28 seconds adrift after a month in which she won the Dam to Dam Half-marathon in Holland, won the Berlin Marathon in a world best 2:20:43 and completed a hat-trick of World Half-marathon titles.
Now Chepchumba is on 230km (well over 100 miles) a week - her eyes sparkling at the thought of getting back to her favourite 6km forest loop near Detmold as she completes her London preparations.
And there’s no way she is going to throw a gauntlet down to her friend or any of their rivals, for that matter. She says: "You cannot say I will win. It’s not a 5k that you can sprint and win without thinking about. It’s a long way to go."
Then the positive attitude returns: "Every time I ran London, I improved my time." Not quite right: she went 2:30:09 in 1996 for second, won in a Kenyan record 2:26:51 in 1997 in that fabulous finish with McColgan, dipped to third in 2:27:22 in 1998, then ran that women-only world best last year while Loroupe was clocking 2:22:48, the world best performance, among the men in Rotterdam.
So will Chepchumba go faster this time? The smile - surely one of the readiest in athletics - fades as she gets down to the real business of the marathon: "I cannot tell because they have tough women this time. More than ever. But I will try to improve my time if possible." She pauses, her mind enveloping more than the 26.2 miles: "Then there is the health. You can never tell. It is all on how you feel on the day." Remind her of how fighting fit she was on that day she pipped McColgan, and her eyes roll: "I was almost hallucinating. I saw a sign that I thought said 800 metres to go and thought, ‘I will never give up.’ Even when I came over the line, I never knew I had won until people told me." And this time she will blank her friendship with Loroupe out of her mind for as long as the race takes.
She knows where the hype’s coming from: "We’re both world record-holders." But she also knows there are more dangers: "Lidia Simon for instance. And Adriana Fernandes is fast."
More revealing, though, is the attitude she will take to the start line: "I don’t say, ‘Tegla is there. Somebody else is there.’ "You just have to concentrate on yourself. You might lose the race if you start to look at someone else and say, ‘She’s tough’." Which brings me to wondering where Chepchumba gets her toughness from. For once, the reply is not immediate. The smile disappears. Eventually, after what seems an entire lap of that boring indoor centre in Detmold, she says:
"Ask another question while I think about that."
OK, Joyce, so what do you want to do after London? The answer is instant - "go to the Olympics" - and reveals where the toughness came from. Atlanta 1996.
"It was terrible," she grimaces of her only Olympic Games - and the only ‘did not finish’ on her marathon record. "It was humid. Too bad. I went to 15k then ..." Her voice trails away much as her dreams were smothered by air as damp as a warm, wet blanket.
It was that miserable memory which spurred her on to beat McColgan so sensationally. And again in Chicago last autumn when she beat her compatriot Margaret Okayo by a single second in 2:25:59 - a triumph of which she is justifiably proud: "We started at 9am. It was so cold and I didn’t have gloves. I fell down at 11 miles. I hurt my knee and my elbow. But I never gave up. I didn’t want to win as much as I wanted to finish the race. Afterwards, everyone looked at the blood and said, ‘Didn’t you feel the pain?’ I think I didn’t because I was so cold."
Then in an instant, she’s looking forward again. Not dreaming, though. Realistically assessing her Sydney prospects, she says: "Up to now I don’t know. We are still waiting for the national federation to tell us who is selected.
"If I go to the Olympics this time, I cannot stop. I have to finish. To have a medal is best. Better even than money."
And the richest earner in the world of women’s marathon running goes on: "You can have money but sometimes money gets finished. You can show your medal to your children."
It’s the least Chepchumba and young Collins deserve for being apart for so much of each year.
Trevor Frecknall is the News Editor Of Athletics Weekly
