Editor’s note: Kenyans swept the honors at the 106th Boston Marathon in April. Rodgers Rop became the 11th Kenyan men’s champion in 12 years, reclaiming the top spot for Kenya after a South Korean placed first last year. Kenyan men took the first four places, six of the top seven and nine of the top 13. Another Kenyan, Margaret Okayo, claimed the women’s title, followed by countrywoman Catherine Ndereba, who had won the previous two years.

Most of us are aware of Kenya’s domination of distance running, but how many know that a single Kenyan ethnic group takes most of the top prizes in the sport? All of the nine Kenyan men who finished in the top 13 in Boston were Kalenjin.

For more on the Kalenjin as runners read the excerpts below, adapted from a paper by RPCV John Manners (Kenya, 69-71), presented to the British Society of Sports History in April 1997 (and published in the Society’s journal, The Sports Historian No. 17/2, November 1997). Manners, who taught and coached track at Kaplong Secondary School in Kericho District, is working on a book about Kenya’s running tribe. For the full article, go to www.Kenyarunner.com.

The Kalenjin people of Kenya have a remarkable faculty for turning out world-class distance runners. These people, who number fewer than 3 million, or about 10 percent of Kenya’s population, have earned about 75 percent of Kenya’s distance running honors.

That number is impressive enough, in view of the degree to which Kenya dominates the sport. But looked at another way, the figures are even more remarkable. Over the past dozen years, athletes from this single tribe have won about 40 percent of the biggest international honors in men’s distance running. (Kalenjin women—and Africa women in general—have lagged behind the men for reasons that are beyond the scope of this article.)

The Kalenjin excel in all three of distance running's disciplines: cross country, road racing and track. In cross-country, they have utterly taken over the annual World Championships. Since 1986, when Kenya began taking the Championships seriously, its men have won every team race, with Kalenjin runners making up three-quarters of the team members and winning just over half of all the individual medals. In road racing, Kalenjin men occupied five of the top 10 spots on Runner’s World’s annual road race rankings for 2001 and they currently hold all but one of the world-best times for the eight standard road race distances from 5K to the marathon.

On the track, Kalenjin supremacy dates from the mid-1960s. In the eight Olympics in which Kenya has participated since independence (the country boycotted in 1976 and 1980), Kalenjin men have won 32 medals (10 of them gold) in the five endurance track events (800m, 1500m, 5000m, 10,000m, and 3000m steeplechase). That’s 28 percent of the medals available, and three times the comparable total of the next best whole country. In recent years their dominance has become even more lopsided. In the three Olympics and six track and field World Championships since 1990, Kalenjin distance men have won 52 medals, 20 of them gold—39 percent and 44 percent, respectively, of the available totals.

Altitude, Diet, Incentives

This record marks what is probably the greatest geographical concentration of achievement in the annals of sport. What makes these people so good? I’ll review some common speculation on this subject and then offer a couple of suggestions of my own.

Altitude is most people’s first thought, and with reason. Elevations of 6,000 feet or more are common in Kalenjin country. Leading a vigorous outdoor life in the thin air at such altitudes has been shown to help create the high aerobic capacity that’s vital to distance running. Every track fan has heard stories of runners’ childhoods in these highlands spent chasing cattle or jogging to school. The question is why these circumstances have been so much more helpful to the Kalenjin than to other high altitude dwellers. Where are the world-class athletes from Nepal, Peru, and Lesotho?

How about diet? When I first wrote about Kalenjin runners more than 20 years ago, nutritional theories of the time ascribed benefits to the relatively high proportion of protein in their diet (from cow’s milk and blood), compared with the diets of other African peoples. Actually, by Western standards, Kalenjin protein intake was low—lower still among mess-fed soldiers and schoolboys, from whose ranks most of the athletes come. These days, however, conventional dietary wisdom touts complex carbohydrates, and Kenyans’ starchy fare has often been cited as a possible source of runners’ strength. The Kalenjin diet is indeed starchy, but then so is the diet of most Third World peoples. Starch, after all, is what subsistence farmers subsist on.

Material incentives are the time-honored explanation for ethnic disproportion in professional sports. Consider the succession of Irish, Italian, black and Latino boxers from the wrong side of the tracks. The downtrodden groups’ success is thought to spring from hordes of boys taking up the sport to escape poverty. The same reasoning is often applied to running in Kenya. The availability of U.S. college scholarships, prize money and appearance fees has boosted interest and participation throughout the country. But the Kalenjin were turning out world-class runners long before such rewards became available, and they continue to turn out three times as many as the rest of Kenya’s tribes combined.

Clearly, none of these factors is sufficient to explain Kalenjin success, but neither can they be dismissed out of hand. Altitude by itself, for example, doesn’t account for much. But 6,000-foot elevations combined with equatorial latitudes make an ideal climate for sustained outdoor activity: comfortably warm days, cool nights, low humidity. That climate, together with altitude’s aerobic benefits is one reason Kenya’s highlands are an ideal home for distance running. And it’s worth pointing out that every one of the country’s world-class runners is a highlander.

Diet, too, has come significance, though I doubt if it has much to do with complex carbohydrates. Rather, it’s that like most Kenyans, and unlike many of the world’s poor, the Kalenjin have enough to eat. The simple fact that Western Kenya has excellent farmland and a reliable food supply sets the country apart from many places that might otherwise be breeding grounds for runners.

That brings me back to poverty, which is also important but not quite in the clichéd sense of a grim environment that drives young men to train as they dream of escape. The green hills of western Kenya, where almost all the runners originate, are a far cry from a teeming slum. And compared with other African countries, Kenya has been fairly well supplied with basic necessities. Malnutrition is rare, infant mortality among the lowest in Africa, and life expectancy among the highest. And the country has been able to support the institutions—schools, uniformed services—that provide an athletic infrastructure. Kenya is at least prosperous enough to offer athletic opportunities.

Yet the people are poor and unemployment is high. Kenya’s per capita GDP is about $1,200 a year, less than 1/20th that of a prosperous Western country. To the average Kenyan, even the meager winnings most professional runners bring in look lavish. The prospect of earning $10,000 a year as a second or third-rank road racer is a powerful incentive, and in view of the hundreds of Kenyans now making that kind of money, not an unrealistic ambition. Someone who thinks he has potential as a runner might reasonably devote a year or two to intensive training in hopes of attracting an agent’s attention and securing an invitation to an overseas race.

Still, while there’s something in each of these factors—altitude, diet, poverty—that helps explain the phenomenon of Kenyan running as a whole, none of them begins to account for the hugely disproportionate success of the Kalenjin. For that, we have to look more closely at circumstances unique to the tribe.

A Collective Genetic Gift

An obvious thought is that the Kalenjin might be endowed with some sort of collective genetic gift. This is a touchy subject, of course, and there’s no replicable scientific data to support the idea. But the prima facie case for a genetic explanation makes some sense: the Kalenjin marry mainly among themselves; they’ve lived for centuries at altitudes of 6,000 feet or more; and, at least by tradition, they spend their days chasing up and down hills after livestock. So it’s not unreasonable to suggest that over time some sort of genetic adaptation has taken place that has turned out to be helpful in competitive distance running.

This notion gets some flimsy support from the fact that ethnographic and linguistic data link the Kalenjin to tribes elsewhere in East Africa that have turned out a majority of their country’s world-class runners: the Oromo in Ethiopia, the Iraqw and Barabaig in Tanzania and the Tutsi in Burundi.

What I find more intriguing, however, is the possibility that some of these peoples’ customs might have functioned indirectly as genetic selection mechanisms favoring strong runners. I’m thinking specifically of the practice of cattle raiding. It was common to all these pastoral peoples, but in Kenya, at least, the Kalenjin were among its foremost practitioners.

Kalenjin raids often called for treks of more than 100 miles to capture livestock and drive them home before the former owners could catch up. The better a young man was at raiding—in large part, a function of his speed and endurance—the more cattle he accumulated. And since cattle were what a prospective husband needed to pay for a bride, the more a man had, the more wives he could buy, and the more children he was likely to father. It’s not hard to imagine that such a reproductive advantage might cause a significant shift in a group’s genetic makeup over the centuries.

Much as I enjoy this sort of speculation, however, there are no scientific data to substantiate a genetic theory. The Scandinavian exercise physiologists Bengt Saltin and Henrik Larsen have recently completed a controlled comparison of the response to training of Kalenjin and Danish boys, and the results made public so far appear promising. But without far more complete evidence, notions of Kalenjin genetic superiority rest on anecdotal data—which can be surprisingly persuasive. For example, I’ve collected a dozen brief case studies of Kalenjin young men in their 20s who had never thought of themselves as runners until they wound up in circumstances that obliged them to take up the sport. Most often, this happened when friends who were runners had helped them to secure American track scholarships under false pretenses. Once on campus, the non-runners had to run in order to stay, and in each case I’ve found so far, within a matter of months of starting training, the non-runners had become, at minimum, national-class collegiate athletes.

An Austere Warrior Culture

These examples suggest that an extraordinary proportion of Kalenjin have innate gifts that place them near the top of the range of human potential in distance running. But even if many or most Kalenjin are blessed with such endowments, that doesn’t account for their astonishing record in major championships. To succeed in those circumstances, an athlete must not only be able to run fast, but to run fastest when it matters most. And in this ability to perform under pressure, the Kalenjin are supreme.

What is it that gives seemingly every Kalenjin runner the ability to summon an extraordinary effort when it matters most? I believe it’s the result of conditioning—that the tribe’s austere warrior culture prepares young Kalenjin almost from birth not to quail under pressure.

The most obvious and probably the most significant set of customs in this regard is the series of escalating physical ordeals each boy undergoes while growing up, culminating in circumcision, which marks initiation into adulthood. Circumcision is the central event in the life of every Kalenjin youth, anticipated for years with dread and suffered with unblinking stoicism under the eyes of watchful elders, who are ready to brand a boy a coward for life if he so much as winces. It’s not hard to see how this rite might help develop a capacity to put up with pain, which, of course, is vital in running long races.

But circumcision is far from unique to the Kalenjin. Dozens of societies in Kenya and hundreds elsewhere in Africa use more or less the same operation for more or less the same purpose, accompanied by comparable community-wide celebration. But I believe there are significant differences in the Kalenjin rite—differences not in kind, but in degree.

In general, the Kalenjin initiation and the long recovery period that follows are invested with more secrecy and solemnity, and with greater importance as a means of inculcating standards of behavior. The operation itself is more physically arduous, and the sanctions for failure more severe (flinching in fear or pain can result in a kind of permanent internal banishment).

Perhaps most important is the pervasive sense that the traits of character tested in the ritual—courage, endurance, determination, restraint—are the ones the tribe values above all, and that to pass the test is to affirm those values, to fail it is to betray them. Thus, as the initiates approach the predawn ceremony, they’re quite conscious of bearing the weight not only of their own fears and hopes, and those of their family and friends, but also those of the whole community, the tribe and centuries of Kalenjin tradition. A boy who stands up under that kind of pressure at 14 or 15 is unlikely at 25 to be anything but invigorated by the comparatively benign tensions accompanying an Olympic final. And if he was able as a boy to muster the strength to endure the excruciating pain of circumcision, what must he be able to do as a man when faced with nothing more than the aches and fatigue of the closing laps of a tough race?