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D e a d M a n R u n n i n gAt this month’s World ChAmpionships in dAegu, south KoreA, the men’s mArAthon Will be missing its brightest tAlent. WhAt felled the KenyAn prodigy sAmmy WAnjiru?

jonathan hor n

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it was a brutal Beijing morning. The Chinese Communist Party, those improvisers par excellence, had nutted

out a way of beating the pollution. Entire industrial cities 300km to the north had shut for August. Odd-numbered car number plates on Tuesdays, even numbers on Wednesdays. Ten thousand CCTV cameras that could send any transgressor to prison ... Chinese prison. But even they were powerless against 35-degree heat and 95 per cent humidity. The men’s Olympic marathon, so often an afterthought and so often blighted by extreme heat, loomed as another war of attrition.

Samuel Wanjiru – tiny, curiously-shaped, baby-faced and (outside of Kenya and athletics circles) pretty much unknown – was in a tizz. He’d managed all of half an hour’s sleep the night before and was wearing a pair of B-grade runners, having left his racing f lats in Kenya. Whether it was pre-ordained or not, he was about to make a mockery of the most sacred of athletics events, traditionally an exercise in prudence and self-control.

For the average punter, the marathon was one of the few events you could watch without an ID card hanging around your neck and the obligatory five-fold security check. You could park yourself at your vantage point of choice in this vast and

intimidating city and behold the final event of one of the more remarkable Olympic Games of our time. Mine was at the ten-kilometre mark, a good spot to get a handle on how the race was unfolding.

Wanjiru, f lanked by an ever-dwindling band of masochists, most of them East African, went hard from the gun. The first 10km was run in a mind-boggling 29:25. As they glided past (witnessed at close range, elite-distance runners have an almost skating and sliding quality about them), an Englishman spied me – a fellow westerner amidst what seemed like a university of Chinese student volunteers – and said what we were all thinking.

“Suicide.”By the 25km mark the leaders were still

f lying, well ahead of world record pace. All but four runners had dropped off. The stragglers were splintered and confused: what are these kamikazes doing? Australia’s Lee Troop, who’d set up camp in an oxygen tent in his living room for the best part of six months, looked like he was being subjected to a 42.2km autopsy.

Wanjiru decided to turn up the wick. Throughout the morning he’d unleashed periodical, debilitating surges, almost sprinting at certain points. The rest of the time he tracked every doomed counter punch with ease. At the 37km mark he

threw in a fierce kick that sealed the gold medal. Commentating for Channel 7, Steve Moneghetti had already dubbed it the greatest marathon ever run.

It wasn’t supposed to be like this. Olympic marathons are usually dreary affairs. They’re invariably run on hilly, unsuitable courses under a searing sun. The lack of a pacemaker ensures the contest becomes a tactical game of ducks and drakes that’s decided by a sit and sprint. The best marathoner in the world, with a reputation forged in the mega-rich, super-flat courses of Boston, Chicago and Rotterdam, usually limps into the stadium while the winner is giving his press conference.

Wanjiru didn’t even look the part. Lined up alongside your typical Kenyan male long-distance athlete – tall, rangy and long-striding – he looked like a pygmy. He was a 162cm shuff ler with improbably big quad muscles and a pec-first action. Entering the Birds Nest Stadium, having slowed down noticeably once he’d shored up gold, Wanjiru chested the finishing tape, made the sign of the cross and dropped to his knees. At just his third attempt at the marathon, looking as though he didn’t know exactly what he was doing, he’d broken the Olympic record by nearly three minutes and finished a minute clear of the silver medallist, with bronze almost a kilometre-and-a-half further back. It was a demolition. “My plan was to push the limits, push my body,” he explained to journalists afterwards. “Our Kenyan bodies are not used to a slow pace, and a slow pace would’ve been suicidal.”

Less than three years later, Sammy Wanjiru was dead. “Suicide,” said the local police chief. He was thick-set and nervous and he was explaining to a stunned throng of reporters what had happened to the hero of the nation, who was lying, barely cold, in a pool of blood outside his palatial home. “He jumped from the bedroom balcony. He’s not here to tell us what he was thinking when he jumped. We don’t suspect foul play.”

One suspects that Goren of Law And Order fame was not fronting the investigation. Indeed, Kenya’s police force is chastised daily for its ineptitude, its languid chiefs, its glacial procedures, its sniff of subornation. To get to the bottom of the Sammy Wanjiru story, a story surely worthy of a Sub-Saharan Shakespeare, the investigation begins several decades ago in the Rift Valley, the cradle of Kenyan long-distance running.

sammy wanjiru was born – and would die – in Nyahururu, a small town in the Rift Valley 190km

northwest of Nairobi. As good as it looks on a postcard and as popular as it is with visiting distance runners hoping to glean an insight into Kenyan secrets, it has a darker side. Just recently a woman was nearly lynched after she stole two Bibles from a supermarket. Obscene wealth lives alongside abject poverty. In many ways

it’s a microcosm of Kenya itself.By African standards, Kenya is a

functioning country. But it teeters. Four million of its citizens are malnourished and the majority scratch together a living on the land. Corruption is rife and HIV is rampant; one-and-a-half-million at the last conservative estimate. Political violence, invariably played out along tribal lines, is also on the rise. Together with parts of Somalia and Ethiopia, the country is currently aff licted by the worst drought in half a century. In some parts there hasn’t been a drop of rain for three years.

Three-quarters of its citizens live at high altitude – 5000 feet or more. In the thin air they develop powerful hearts and lungs to compensate for the lack of oxygen. The children run. It’s a regularly trotted-out cliche that Kenyan kids run ridiculous distances to school each morning, run home in the afternoon and then tend to goats and sheep and chase livestock up and down the mountainside at night. But the cliche is pretty much true. When they run, they run barefoot. They’re all arms and legs but they cultivate a f luid, uncomplicated, loping style that in the heat of an Olympic final can sometimes trick you into thinking they’re not trying.

Adharanand Finn, whose book Running With The Kenyans will be published next year, writes of their great runners: “I have yet to hear of one who comes from an even moderately wealthy family.” In this regard Wanjiru’s childhood was a typically Kenyan one. Home was cramped and smoky but there was always enough food. His formal education ceased by the time he was 12. Like any other young Kenyan teenager, he endured an excruciating circumcision under the watchful eyes of elders and the local community. The less he f linched, the more he was respected. Strength, resilience and endurance were the measures of his manliness and he had them in abundance.

As a member of the Kikuyu tribe, he was already an anomaly. When it comes to athletics, a high proportion of the country’s gold medallists come from the Kalenjin tribe, whose members are not only blessed with long limbs and fast- twitch muscle fibres, but wield a lot of the country’s political power as well.

Like so many Kenyan teenage prodigies, Wanjiru was spotted by an agent and shipped off to Japan, a country he’d never heard of. “It was very cold”, he would later tell a reporter. It was also his lottery ticket. It certainly toughened him up. Training in Kenya is a fascinating study in “less is more”. There are no junk miles in the Rift Valley. They bound through the hills early in the morning, at a conversational pace, in large groups, and the rest of the day consists of a lot of napping and a lot of cups of tea. Coaches focus on running form and the economy of effort, the Kenyan trademarks. Pilates and yoga classes build strong cores and help ward off injuries.

Japan was the antitheses. The Japanese are mad for marathons and their coaches subscribe to voluminous distances and pain for gain. Stopwatches, clipboards, coaches barking out instructions – here we have the “body and mind” approach to running. The imports are provided with an education, expert coaching and a stack of money. In return, they act as brand ambassadors for companies such as Toyota and NEC.

Despite crippling homesickness and a body that refused to sprout, Wanjiru thrived. At a tick over 18 years of age, he was the world record holder for the half-marathon and also held the world junior record for the 10,000m on the track. By the time he toed the line in Beijing he’d run two very slick marathons for a first and a second and while he was by no means a household name, his tender years and unfettered approach suggested a bright future, given that most marathon runners don’t peak until well into their mid 30s.

That Beijing morning represented a paradigm shift, both in the way marathons would now be run and how Wanjiru would conduct his life. As the first marathon gold medallist in an athletics-crazy nation, Wanjiru was a rockstar – young, good-

looking and wealthy beyond belief. Marathon runners can sometimes seem a little anonymous to western audiences, mainly because the western athletes don’t stack up. But the youngster was as big in Kenya as Usain Bolt was in Jamaica, Michael Phelps was in America and Stephanie Rice was in Australia. Unlike them, however, dealing with this new-found adulation manifested itself in a slightly more calamitous way than sucking on a bong or getting snapped in a policewoman’s outfit.

Wanjiru returned to Kenya a national hero. Paraded through his hometown in a Hummer, complete with a convoy of 100 vehicles, he was then initiated as a Kikuyu warrior by elders. Decked out in traditional Kikuyu elder attire and head mask, they presented him with a goat and handed him a spear, signifying that he would guard the local community. And life would never be the same. American author and journalist Matt Alexander wrote upon his death, “The same quality that made Wanjiru great may have foreordained his early passing; an almost out-of-control energy, a way of attacking life and its challenges. I had the pleasure of meeting him last year and was struck by just that quality. He seemed }

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person after winning the gold medal in Beijing.”

The money was rolling in for Sammy Wanjiru ... and

his esteem grew.

after his London Marathon win in 2009, Sammy Wanjiru was expected

to return to the English capital next year for more celebrations.

powerless to contain the storm of energy inside him as he bounced around the Rock ‘n’ Roll New Orleans race expo, signing autographs, answering interviewers’ questions and posing for photographs, all with an uninterrupted smile on his face.” Former coach Robert Kioni, the man who spotted and nurtured his talents, was a little more succinct: “He became a different person after winning the gold medal in Beijing.”

The life of a marathon runner is a strange one. Serious competition may be limited to one or two races a year. They train hard, often in seclusion, and sporadically emerge from their anonymity to great fanfare. Coaches are often nothing more than yes men and water bottle fillers. In this way it’s not unlike the life of a professional boxer; there’s a lot of scope to go off the rails.

Wanjiru’s poisons were the bottle, the skirt and – depending on who you believe – high-powered assault rif les. He was renowned for racking up astronomical drinks bills and dishing out huge tips. On any given night he could be seen holding forth in the local bars, signing autographs, posing for photographs and fending off admirers, a drink and a new girl always at the ready.

His marriage to Triza Njeri was explosive.

He was arrested for threatening both her and his maid with an AK-49 Kalashnikov rif le and reportedly attacked one of his security staff with the butt of his weapon. As bizarre as it sounds, it’s common for Kenyan athletes – particularly those who make money and enjoy some sort of public profile – to carry a gun in self-defence. Botched kidnappings and clumsy extortion attempts are commonplace. Indeed, Wanjiru’s house had been broken into twice in the last year, with thugs storming his mansion armed with machetes and pistols. True to form, Wanjiru was not home on both occasions – the first time he was out running, the second he was at a karaoke bar.

On Valentine’s Day this year, he and his wife publically reconciled on live TV. With the cameras rolling, a little wobbly on their feet and with Mariah Carey’s Love Takes Time belting out in the background, the couple kissed, their eyes darting between the camera and one another. She dropped charges the next day. Suspicions of a charade were proved correct shortly afterwards when she moved out of the family home and settled in Nairobi, their two kids in tow.

Like Bolt, Wanjiru’s Olympic social life

didn’t impinge upon his ability to train and race. “Wanjiru was an extraordinary human being,” says Francis Kamau, who had taken over as his coach. “Even when he spent the whole night in a bar he would show up for training on time and still be the best.”

The money was rolling in and his esteem grew. He banked three $500,000 cheques and clocked the fastest time ever recorded in a marathon in both the States and the UK, courtesy of his wins at the 2009 London marathon and the 2009 and 2010 Chicago events. His last win cemented his place in athletics history. The Chicago marathon of 2010, where an underdone Wanjiru, aff licted by a knee injury and a stomach virus, bested Ethiopia’s Tsegaye Kebede, is considered by everyone in the know to be the greatest marathon ever run. Three times Wanjiru was dropped and seemingly broken and three times he clawed his way back, eventually producing a withering sprint finish to win in front of hundreds of thousands of spectators. “I think I could run the marathon in under two hours,” he later told the press, which just a few years earlier would’ve been tantamount to declaring he could f ly to the moon.

Toni Reavis is the doyen of athletics journalism and broadcasting. Here he is following the 2010 Chicago marathon. A little over the top, granted, but he’s peerless when it comes to his knowledge of the marathon. “For all those who saw Chicago 2010, there may one day be a race to equal it, but none that can surpass its brilliance and passion,” he wrote. “The glory of sport and the potential of the human spirit were brought into high relief on 10/10/10. Gentlemen and women of the assembled press corps, dispassionate chroniclers, threw aside their cloaks of indifference and rose in full-throttled appreciation of the magnificence unfolding before them.”

The potential of the human spirit certainly wasn’t brought into high relief on 15/05/11. Wanjiru’s knee problems still dogged him and he hadn’t raced for the best part of half a year, but he’d just completed a rigorous training camp and was reportedly in good shape. Early in the morning he embarked on a bar crawl of sorts and later in the evening picked up a girl called Jane Nduta, described variously as a callgirl, a waitress, a barmaid and a friendly fan.

Reconstructions of what happened next are so muddled, so cobbled together and so contradictory that they continue to polarise Kenyans and confound the investigators. At around 11.30pm, Njeri arrived home and found the pair in bed. According to her, she locked the couple in his room and stormed off, after unsuccessfully trying to clock them both with a f lying jug of water. According to police, Wanjiru either took a deliberate dive off the first-f loor balcony or accidentally toppled over the edge in some sort of stumbling, drunken, navigationally skewiff attempt to get to his hysterical wife. He fell about four metres and died instantly. }

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Wanjiru’s poisons were the bottle and the skirt.

Wanjiru’s passing left his three wives, including triza

njeri [right], devastated.

The subsequent scene was a circus. Scores of friends, neighbours, journalists, police officers, men claiming to be his father (at least one of them was a dead ringer) and assorted loiterers all converged on his house to mourn, to theorise and to generally make the investigation as difficult as possible. Amidst the chaos, two more women had joined in the mourning. Mary Wacera, herself an international runner, was joined by a heavily pregnant Judy Wambui. Wacera had a seven-month-old daughter that was said to be Wanjiru’s and was even named after his mother, Hannah. Both women claimed to be his wife. “I am bitter that I have lost a loving husband who provided for me and my daughter,” said Wacera. “It is unfortunate that he has gone before the arrival of a child that he

promised to love unconditionally,” said an equally tearful Wambui. In Kenya, where polygamy is legal, they shared a legitimate right to grieve a lost husband. The question of their right to a slice of his riches was a little more murky.

The case abounds with unanswered questions. If it’s true, as she claims, that Njeri summoned her husband home urgently, why would he then invite a random pick up to the family home? How could a professional athlete, one of the fittest men on the planet, die from such a minor fall? Why wasn’t the crime scene properly secured? Why were the police so quick to declare suicide? Why did they change their verdict so quickly to “accident”? Why did it take more than a fortnight to conduct an autopsy? And what exactly did his wife and

other hangers-on stand to gain from his death? His manager, Federico Rosa, for one was

adamant he hadn’t jumped. “I talked to him yesterday and the day before. It was going well and smoothly and he had no problem at all. This I can guarantee – it was not a suicide at all.”

Dr Emily Rogena, who conducted the post mortem, was adamant, too. She concluded that Wanjiru was killed not by the fall, but by a fatal blow to the back of head that fractured his skull. “Taking into consideration the history and the post mortem, death is attributed to head injuries, secondary to blunt force trauma to the back of the head.” Her findings were echoed by Dr Moses Njue, who added, “He landed on his legs and supported himself with his hands. Where did the injury on the back of his head come from?” The problem is, both were working on behalf of his mother, who maintains that her son was murdered. These views were repudiated by another doctor working on behalf of – you guessed it – Njeri, who insisted that he had died from the fall and nothing else. To date there has been nothing even remotely resembling an independent investigation.

every athletics fan was stinging for the marathons at this month’s World Championships in Daegu and

next year’s Olympics in London. Usain Bolt can win the major sprints while compiling a crossword. Kenny Bekele has a mortgage on the big-distance track events. But Samuel Wanjiru versus Haile Gebrselassie loomed as a match made in African heaven. In one corner was one of the great sportsmen of the last 100 years, the Emperor of Ethiopia, the affable 38-year-old who can still knock out a sub-2:04 marathon, the tiny little man with the big smile who’ll possibly one day lead his troubled country. In the other was the young upstart from the bitter neighbouring rival, equally diminutive, equally likeable, arguably destined for even greater feats. His own prime minister called him “one of our sure bets for gold in the upcoming contest”. But no match race now. Just a big mess. And a funeral.

It rained heavily at the requiem mass, which was held at a local sports stadium. Security was on high alert owing to assorted lurk merchants and the threats his mother had made to disrupt proceedings. A life was celebrated and good things were said. Indeed, the thing that stands out in researching Wanjiru’s life – in athletics circles, on internet forums, in the Kenyan press – is that ne’er a bad word is said about him, despite his many frailties.

Afterwards, the body was taken back to his farm. Samuel Wanjiru – bar propper, pantsman, gun toter, Olympic champion, national hero, Kikuyu warrior, millionaire, speaker of five languages, father of two, husband to three – was lowered into the ground with a 21-gun salute. He was 24-years-old. n

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Ne’er a bad word is said about him, despite his

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Why did it take more than a fortnight to conduct

Wanjiru’s autopsy?