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After Cheptegei bids farewell to track events, what next for us?
ROBERT MADOI
What you need to know:
Everyone was scrumming around a TV set outside the supermarket. This raised the possibility, even if only slightly, that a medal-less spell that occupied three summer Olympic Games was destined to be snapped.
I still vividly remember the day Stephen Kiprotich won gold in the men's marathon final at London 2012. To be clear, it was not an event that held my rapt attention. I was actually out shopping with the missus when, armed with a wilful disbelief, it was brought to my notice that Team Uganda was in business.
Everyone was scrumming around a TV set outside the supermarket. This raised the possibility, even if only slightly, that a medal-less spell that occupied three summer Olympic Games was destined to be snapped.
While this was the business end of the marathon final, a few members that constituted the scrum were still riven with doubt. Its underlying intention, extraordinary though it now seems, was to create a guardrail just in case anything happened.
Many of us had felt an acute disassociation with Team Uganda after its athletes kept falling by the wayside. The last man, of course, kept standing, and, thanks to that, Uganda's anthem was the amongst the final ones to be played at London 2012.
It was a moment of pure sensation. And, while Joshua Cheptegei—twice—and Peruth Chemutai have replicated the feat, London 2012’s last gasp gold still takes some beating.
The men's marathon will not draw the curtain on the ongoing Olympic Games as it did a dozen years ago. Instead, it takes place on the penultimate day of Paris 2024, which is, of course, today. While you can bet your bottom dollar that your columnist will have his finger on the road event, unlike at London 2012, I remain less sanguine. Sort of.
While Victor Kiplangat and Stephen Kissa are no slouches, the mistake is in imagining or even expecting odds-on favourites like Eliud Kipchoge, 39, and Kenenisa Bekele, 42, to set their feet off the gas pedal. Both literally and figuratively. They will not.
All said, there is something unavoidably primal about your columnist coming dangerously close to writing off Team Uganda's chances in the men's marathon final.
Much like athletes, mere mortals like yours truly, who look from the outside in, are enthralled and—reluctantly—seduced by superstition[s]. A disposal of ritual then would see me talk up, say, Kiplangat's credentials that have yielded World and Commonwealth titles.
While the two feats are hardly a cakewalk, I have a feeling that the man himself knows that underestimating his rivals' capabilities and overestimating his own will be the ultimate kiss of death today.
Since this column does not expect Kiplangat to be full of catastrophic confidence on the road Saturday, you could rightly conclude that the marathoner has an old head on young shoulders. Which is just as well, since he is only 24.
Traditionally, the marathon was construed as a retirement destination, if you will, for distance runners. Not any more. Joshua Cheptegei, 27, has already been bitten by the marathon bug.
Given the smarts that Jacob Kiplimo showcases in road running events, and how he has acknowledged the same, surprise should be the least reaction when—not if—he too makes the switch.
As this column has previously noted, the snub of distance running events by the Diamond League will give the Abbott World Marathon Majors a shot in the arm.
If it has not already. What does this all mean, you would ask…Well, Uganda let out a collective mourn this past week on learning that both Cheptegei and Kiplimo would not, as earlier planned, double up at Paris 2024.
Delving with genteel insistence into the decision, a few critics came to the conclusion that it was arrived at after considering a money purse that will be dangled in forthcoming road events.
This should not come as a vulgar surprise. What should worry us all is how, if any, we have planned for forthcoming Olympic track events shorn of the presence of Cheptegei and, quite possibly, Kiplimo.
Take the two away—along with Peruth Chemutai—and Team Uganda once again returns to a dark past where it made up the numbers.
Cheptegei's coach, Addy Ruiter, once told your columnist as much. This is a concern that we certainly cannot wish away if we intend to remain at our zestful best.
For now, though, we can continue to bask in the glory of the current feats and hope that the goddess of good fortune will continue to be kind to us today as indeed it will be, I suspect, at Los Angeles 2028. With Cheptegei on the road.
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