I’m sitting in the Grand Pri restaurant in Eldoret waiting for the start of the London marathon. The owner, former half-marathon world-record holder and world 10,000m champion Moses Tanui, has promised a London Marathon party, and the whole place is kitted out with red balloons and posters. Moses and his friends are all wearing red Virgin London Marathon jackets, smiling and handing out whistles.
Downstairs in the underground bar area, hundreds of people are sitting in front of big screens awaiting the start. The only problem: there’s no power. The TVs are all blank. And the race is about to begin.
Moses seems unperturbed. He has a generator, he says. Things will be up and running in a minute. But when the power eventually comes on, about 45 minutes later, for some reason the only thing any of the TVs can tune in to is a programme called Gospel Sunday.
We sit and wait. Moses has invited me to watch the race in his personal office, which contains the biggest TV I’ve ever seen. Also watching the race here are a host of other former running stars. Nobody else seems perturbed that we are missing the race. They sit chatting calmly as the minutes tick by. After a while, I decide to see what the atmosphere is like downstairs in the packed bar. On the way down I pass Moses on the stairs.
“Sorry,” he says as he passes, talking urgently on his phone. He looks slightly traumatised. I make my way under some exposed pipes, passed the blackened kitchens, and into the bar. It’s completely empty. The last man is just leaving.
“The Klique hotel,” he tells me. “It has screens.”
So I leave Moses fretting with a team of engineers and head to the Klique hotel around the corner. It is rammed to the rafters with people cheering and blowing whistles.
By the time I arrive, the Kenyan athlete Mary Keitany has a commanding lead in the women’s race. Last month, I visited her and her husband at their house just outside Iten.
It’s a small, simple place, with a few cows in a field out the back for milk. We sat and drank orange squash in her cramped living room and watched WWF wrestling. Whenever I asked her a question about running she laughed nervously and looked at her husband. And now here she is, charging through the streets of London, the whole world watching as she runs the fourth-fastest marathon ever to win.
By the time she has finished, the men’s race is hotting up. The lead pack includes Emmanuel Mutai. I also spent a few days with him at his training camp just a few weeks ago, chatting with him as he scrubbed his running shoes in a bucket of cold water.
I watched him on a long 38km training run demolish the rest of his camp – including a number of other top runners such as Bernard Kipyego, who came second in the Paris marathon just last week. I said to his coach, Patrick Sang, that no one in the media was talking about Emmanuel as a potential London marathon winner even though he came second last year. “That’s because people who write for newspapers don’t know what they’re talking about,” he replied with a big grin.
A big cheer goes up in the Klique hotel as Emmanuel surges to the front of the field at around 30km and starts leaving the others behind, and I find myself cheering and blowing my whistle like everyone else. It’s strange watching him running on television through the streets of my home city, with the same fluid form and easy air he’d had on the dusty tracks of Kaptagat just weeks before.
In the end, both winners are people I’ve spoken to recently. I feel a warm glow of connection as I tumble out of the bar with everyone else. In the street outside I bump into a few of Emmanuel’s training partners, who smile and shake my hand. “Emmanuel ran well,” they say calmly, almost expectantly. He has just become the fourth-fastest marathon runner ever. And won the London marathon. But to them, it’s just another day’s work.
• The book Running with the Kenyans by Adharanand Finn will be published in 2012.
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