The death of Ugandan marathoner Rebecca Cheptegei on Thursday, following organ failure after being set on fire by her boyfriend in Endebess, Kenya, is a reminder of the abuse women athletes face. Cheptegei is the fourth female athlete to be murdered either by a boyfriend or a husband in Kenya over the last three years.
‘Men lurking around prepared to cash in on somebody else’s efforts’ is how Irish missionary Colm O’Connell, known as the father of Kenyan running, put it. ‘How long will society keep empowering abuse over women?’ Joan Chimelo, a distance runner and the founder member of a non-profit to prevent gender violence, asked.
Chimelo in a post on social media and O’Connell in a documentary were expressing their anguish after the murder of Agnes Tirop nearly three years ago. Tirop, a two-time 10,000m World Championship bronze medallist. was found with stab wounds on her neck. Her husband Ibrahim Rotich was arrested. Iten, the high-altitude long-distance running capital of the world in the Great Rift Valley, and surroundings training centres attracts the best talent in the region but the murders have cast a long shadow.
According to reports, Cheptegei and her children had gone to church when her boyfriend had sneaked into their home. When she returned he doused her with petrol. A piece of land Cheptegei, who is from Uganda but lives in Kenya, had bought in Trans Nzoia county near her training base was a bone of contention. Her father Joseph was quoted as saying that the two were no longer seeing each other. He also asked authorities to ensure that the children and ‘her properties’ were protected.
After Cheptegie’s death, Njeri Migwi, the founder of Usikimye, an organisation that works to prevent gender-based violence, posted on X: “This is Femicide.”
The circumstances that saw Cheptegei’s life snuffed out is similar to Tirop’s, the most high-profile athlete who had met with a gory end. Rotich befriending her when she was a promising teenage runner, offering to become her coach, though he had no formal certification and then trapping her in an abusive relationship once she started earning money from race wins and sponsorships is symptomatic of how men become coaches or boyfriends or husbands of women athletes then try to control their money.
Tirop had dropped out of school and eventually moved out with Rotich to Iten. After the abuse started Tirop moved back in with her parents before shifting to a guesthouse in a training camp. However, once Tirop returned from a race in Germany, Rotich convinced her to return home. In less than 24 hours, she was found murdered.
Days after Tirop was killed, Edith Muthoni, 200 metres and 400 metres specialist, was hacked to death after a domestic quarrel by her husband in Kerugoya.
Six months later, Iten was rocked again by another murder. In a rental house the decomposed body of Ethiopian-born Kenya’s Damaris Muthee Mutua, who had switched allegiance to Bahrain, was found. Her boyfriend was the prime suspect. Cause of death was strangulation, the post-mortem report said.
The murders of Cheptegei, Muthoni, Mutua and Tirop made headlines but there is evidence that hundreds of others could meet a similar fate if adequate steps are not taken to curb gender-based violence.
After Tirop’s murder, the committee on gender welfare in sports in Kenya had conducted a survey. The result: 11 percent of sportswomen in Kenya had been at the receiving end of physical, sexual and emotional abuse.
On Thursday, after Cheptegie passed away in Eldoret Kenya’s Sports Minister Kipchumba Murkomen said that the need of the hour was to protect women athletes. “This tragedy is a stark reminder that we must do more to combat gender-based violence in our society, which in recent years has reared its ugly head in elite sporting circles,” Murkomen said in a statement.
Joan Chelimo, the 2018 Prague half marathon champion, is one of the board members of Tirop’s Angles, started after the athlete’s murder in 2001. A number of distance runners are part of Tirop’s Angles. One of their objectives is to ‘strengthen implementation of laws, policies and action plans on violence against women.’
Speaking to Reuters on Thursday, Chelimo said: “They get into these traps of predators who pose in their lives as lovers.”
One change Tirop’s Angles is trying to bring about is for women athletes to have their own individual bank accounts instead of joint accounts shared with a husband or boyfriend. Agents of athletes are also told to wire money directly to the accounts of the women athletes they represent.
In the Bloomberg documentary ‘Run For Your Life’, Irishman O’Connell who came to Kenya in 1976 to teach geography and then started training camps for runners, talks about how men try to live off the earnings of women athletes after first gaining their trust. “They are opportunists. They see this as a way of enhancing themselves, as a way of getting on in life themselves. As you become a successful person, you’re an easy target,” O’Connell said.
According to unwomen.org report in 2022, the highest number of killings of females by an ‘intimate partner and family’ took place in Africa — 20,000. .This figure was 18,400 in Asia, 7,900 in the Americas and 2,300 in Europe. A demographic and health survey by the Kenya National Bureau of Statistics in 2022 found that 34 percent of women aged between 15 and 49 had experienced physical violence.
In November last year, the accused in Tirop’s murder, her husband Rotich, was granted bail after two years in custody on a bond of $2,600. Tirop’s family is still awaiting justice as the hearings continue in court.
