Analysis: The Murder of Olympic Marathoner Rebecca Cheptegei is an Alarming Call for Action

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Rebecca Cheptegei had simply returned from church together with her two daughters, ages 9 and 11, on a Sunday afternoon. She couldn’t have recognized that later that day, September 1, she would battle to breathe and struggle for her life as she lay within the intensive care unit at Moi Educating and Referral Hospital in Eldoret, Kenya.

Dickson Ndiema, with whom Cheptegei had a relationship however was reportedly separated, confirmed up unannounced to her house in western Kenya. A neighborhood police report said that the 2 had been heard quarreling about land that Cheptegei bought earlier than Ndiema allegedly doused her with a jerrican of gasoline, then set her on hearth.

Kenyan media reported that Cheptegei’s daughters and her sister had witnessed the barbarically violent assault. Ndiema, armed with a machete, blocked efforts to intervene, reported The Normal, one among Kenya’s largest newspapers. A neighbor heard blood-curdling screams for assist. Nevertheless it was too late. The harm would show deadly.

Cheptegei’s practically lifeless physique had grow to be 80 p.c charred by the point she was hospitalized. Her kidneys had failed, and her situation rapidly worsened. Ndiema had additionally suffered burns to 30 p.c of his physique. On September 5, 4 days after the alleged home violence assault—and three weeks after operating the Olympic marathon in Paris—Cheptegei died from a number of organ failure. She was 33. Lower than per week later, Ndiema died from burns sustained throughout the assault.

Kenyans and anxious residents around the globe are collectively shaking their heads not once more because the world mourns this tragic loss. Activists are demanding justice. Cheptegei’s homicide follows a sample of femicide throughout the Kenyan elite ladies’s operating group. Regardless of their athletic success, these athletes couldn’t be protected in a spot the place violence towards ladies shouldn’t be unusual.

“Everyone is responsible,” mentioned Kenyan-Romanian distance runner Joan Chelimo, co-founder of Tirop’s Angels, an athlete-led group that goals to scale back the specter of home violence amongst ladies in Kenya. “We have to get up.”

RELATED: Tirop’s Angels Work to Cease Gender-Primarily based Violence

An Unanswered Name for Assist

Cheptegei lived in Chepkum, a Kenyan village close to the the border with Uganda. Although she was born on the Kenyan aspect of the Kenya-Uganda border, she opted to signify Uganda in athletics competitions. A summer season at excessive altitude in Iten—thought to be the elite operating capital of the world—with the native group Cloud Sports activities helped her to organize for her Olympic debut in Paris. Cheptegei, who holds Uganda’s nationwide marathon document of two:22:47 and positioned 14th within the occasion on the 2023 world championships, completed forty fourth within the Paris Olympic marathon on August 11. She additionally received a gold medal on the 2022 World Mountain and Path Working Championships in Chiang Mai, Thailand.

Her operating coach in Iten, who requested to not be recognized, claims she was psychologically disturbed going into the Video games as a result of ongoing turmoil with Ndiema, which he deduces negatively impacted her efficiency.

Regardless of her expertise in athletics, Cheptegei couldn’t outrun violence. In response to her former coach, Martin Kiplimo Kamakate, Cheptegei left the person who fathered her two daughters in Uganda and moved to Kenya for a romantic relationship with Ndiema. Kamakate claims the pair separated after two years.

Little is publicly recognized about Ndiema. However Cheptegei’s father Joseph Cheptegei described him to media as “an animal,” and advised  the Washington Put up that Ndiema tormented his late daughter for months, beat her, and supposedly said he wished to chop her up. Whereas talking to the media on the hospital final week, he said that Ndiema was reported for home violence and threats towards Cheptegei a number of instances to Trans Nzoia County’s director of legal investigation. Cheptegei’s household says the police didn’t act.

“Victims of gender-based violence ought to be taken severely,” says Kenyan Olympic distance runner Violah Lagat, one of many world’s prime marathoners and a gender-based violence (GBV) activist. “So many ladies who’ve misplaced their lives as a result of GBV might have been saved if actions might have been taken towards the perpetrators.”

As outlined by the United Nations, GBV can embody publicly or privately inflicted bodily or sexual hurt in addition to financial suppression, threats, manipulation, and coercion by numerous methods, together with intimate companion violence and youngster marriage. Males and boys can endure from GBV, however ladies and women are most in danger worldwide, in keeping with the United Nations.

Kenya has one of many highest charges of GBV on the earth. Greater than 40 p.c of girls will expertise intimate companion violence of their lifetime, and one in three ladies in Kenya has skilled sexual violence earlier than the age of 18, in keeping with Nairobi’s Gender Primarily based Violence Restoration Centre, which has supported greater than 44,000 survivors since its inception in 2001. And there are a lot of extra murders and tales of home abuse that go unreported.

The worldwide non-governmental group Human Rights Watch states that top ranges of violence towards ladies and women in Kenya has been a long-running downside partially as a result of lack of providers for victims and survivors in addition to lack of accountability towards perpetrators. The group stories that survivors who had been interviewed uncared for to tell authorities about their abuse, satisfied they wouldn’t be believed or else must pay bribes to obtain assist.

The widespread downside has lengthy inflicted the ladies’s operating group in Kenya, although the problem wasn’t addressed publicly till solely lately. Lagat, who’s a founding member of Tirop’s Angels alongside Chelimo, says it isn’t unusual for feminine skilled and beginner runners to fall into marriages or partnerships with males that take away their autonomy, which might successfully result in combined penalties when an athlete experiences success within the sport.

Kenyan society is deeply patriarchal, successfully resulting in generational gender inequality that has impacted the event of financial empowerment of girls in addition to their rights as residents. It wasn’t till 2010, as an example, when ladies had been granted equal rights to land possession as males. With regard to marriage, polygamy had lengthy been a cultural apply amongst conventional communities in Kenya earlier than the federal government legalized it in 2014. The nation doesn’t acknowledge divorce by consent and maintains a fault-based divorce system. A divorced lady can grow to be ostracized by her group and blamed for the collapse of the wedding.

“My mom’s era could be very completely different from my era,” Chelimo mentioned. “They might beg you to stick with your husband, even in case you are being abused, as a result of that’s how they had been advised by their mother and father.”

Inside the elite operating group, whereas a few of these ladies are highly effective and pushed of their athletic careers, at house, they are often below the management of their companions, or reside in concern in the event that they try to go away them. The extra success they obtain and the extra financially unbiased they grow to be, the extra hazard they will face.

Cheptegei’s operating coach in Iten, who started mentoring her in February 2023, was conscious of Ndiema’s threats and her ongoing issues for her security. He described Ndiema’s habits as controlling and untrustworthy and claimed that Ndiema abused alcohol. Her coach says he repeatedly tried to mitigate the stress and inspired Cheptegei to stay in Iten, the place she might practice and focus in peace. He claims Cheptegei additionally knowledgeable her agent Heusen Makke, hoping that he might intervene.

Cheptegei, a member of the Uganda Folks’s Defence Forces (UPDF) athletics membership, was speculated to return to Iten on September 2, and resume coaching forward of the Army World Video games. (Many athletes in East African nations be part of the police or army drive for the chance to realize help on their athletics groups, which was the case with Cheptegei who was thought-about a UPDF soldier.) As an alternative, her household is making preparations to put her to relaxation at their ancestral house in Bukwo, Uganda.

RELATED: This All-Women Working Membership in Kenya Protects Younger Athletes

A Systemic Problem

Within the wake of Cheptegei’s loss of life, Kenya’s cupboard secretary Onesimus Kipchumba Murkomen said in a press launch, “this tragedy is a stark reminder that we should do extra to fight gender-based violence in our society, which lately has reared its ugly head in elite sporting circles. As a authorities, we stay dedicated to supporting justice for Rebecca.”

Cheptegei’s loss of life is the third high-profile homicide in three years inside Kenya’s elite operating group. In October 2021, 25-year-old rising skilled distance runner Agnes Tirop, who represented Kenya on the 2020 Tokyo Olympics within the ladies’s 5,000-meters, was discovered stabbed to loss of life, allegedly by her husband Ibrahim Rotich at their house in Iten. Rotich, then 41, tried to flee the nation, however he was arrested and charged with homicide. He pleaded not responsible. After two years in custody, in November 2023, Rotich was launched on bond of 400,000 shillings, the equal of $3,100. The case continues to be open.

Six months after Tirop died, in April 2022, the physique of 28-year-old Kenyan-Bahrain distance runner Damaris Muthee Mutua was discovered decomposing at a home in Iten. She was strangled to loss of life, allegedly by her boyfriend, Ethiopian runner Koki Fai, who reportedly fled from the nation after the incident.

At some point after Cheptegei’s loss of life and 5 days after the assault, World Athletics president Sebastian Coe addressed the problem on X. Coe indicated that he was in contact with council members in Africa to evaluate find out how to improve safeguarding insurance policies outdoors of the game. Coe identified that “bringing collectively stakeholders from all areas of athletics to mix forces to guard our feminine athletes to the most effective of our skills from abuse of all types,” was crucial.

Three years after the high-profile homicide of Tirop, it looks as if the president of the game’s worldwide governing physique, who’s serving his third time period, is lastly taking systemic gender-based violence within the sport severely.

A Failed System

Gender-based violence is among the most widespread human rights points on the earth. It’s estimated that one in three ladies will expertise GBV in her lifetime. Chelimo needs to assist change that, beginning in Kenya. Alongside Lagat, she is among the many athlete GBV activists who’re taking dangers and making daring strikes to help ladies who wish to reside and thrive away from the specter of home violence and abuse.

Since 2021, each Chelimo and Lagat in addition to retired skilled marathoner Mary Keitany, —one of the vital profitable within the sport with seven main marathon titles—have continued to champion the message worldwide, emphasizing the issue throughout the ladies’s operating group. Chelimo says the group’s multifaceted mission with Tirop’s Angels is to create better consciousness by training, mentoring, and youth outreach as steps towards reforming the tradition.

Each Lagat and Chelimo understand, nonetheless, that the highway to substantial systemic change is an ultramarathon. And a collective method is a requisite involving the nation’s authorities in addition to a number of world events—together with federations, coaches, managers and brokers, race administrators, and sponsors—and another entity that has a stake in an athlete’s success.

“Extra enforcement must be executed towards the perpetrators,” Chelimo says. “We’d like extra legal guidelines so [victims] have someplace to report this violent abuse.” Chelimo provides that implementing a selected crew of police that may be reached instantly could be a step in the best course. That method, rapid motion may very well be taken to stop a threatening scenario from escalating into one that would flip deadly. Lagat provides that coaches and managers as nicely should train better accountability of their athletes to make sure that nobody in a coaching group is in a threatening circumstance. In different phrases, athletes’ private lives must be vetted on a deeper scale. The addition of counselors and sports activities psychologists might provide a crucial intervention on this regard.

Each Chelimo and Lagat say that Kenya’s justice system lacks the construction essential to punish perpetrators, citing corruption. The police drive’s failure to behave on a number of stories concerning threats towards Cheptegei is an instance of an issue that wants determined consideration and correction, each to guard present victims and to discourage potential future abusers.

“Lack of justice encourages perpetrators and discourages victims from in search of justice,” Lagat says. She suggests a direct measure of establishing secure homes in each county in Kenya and in addition stresses the significance of a preventative method beginning by educating youth.

“Schooling on GBV ought to be a part of the college curriculum simply the identical method PE is,” Lagat says. “Now we have realized types of GBV, like manipulation, intimidation, and sexual abuse begins younger.”

Kenyan skilled marathoner Mary Ngugi, 34, opted to handle the issue by establishing Nala Monitor Membership in Nyahururu City, Kenya, based in October 2022. Her goal with the membership, situated 100 miles north of the nation’s capital Nairobi, is to supply shelter and help women as they concurrently pursue their training and ambitions of changing into elite champion runners.

“There are some issues which have all the time pissed off me,” Ngugi says. “After I was 17, there have been younger women in [training] camps who had been abused by their coaches. Some [girls] are married at a young age due to cash.”

Ngugi says it’s not unusual for younger feminine runners to be afraid of their male coaches. Her thought for a girls-only operating camp was years within the making, initially as a strategy to give again to the group. However after the loss of life of Tirop, Ngugi self-funded Nala Monitor Membership to rapidly transfer her mission ahead.

Justice can’t be achieved with out the group gaining compassion for this systemic societal subject, and extra accountability must fall on probably the most distinguished voices within the sport who’ve an obligation to publicly condemn violence towards ladies. The world hears their silence. In numerous corners of Kenya, ladies and women use operating as a path to a greater life, a method to struggle their method out of poverty and violence. Generally operating is their solely hope. Males in Kenya, aspiring elites and world-class champions, deeply perceive this narrative.

However many near the game in Kenya and those that work on this subject say the important thing to fixing the issue additionally lies in strain that may be utilized by those that management the cash within the sport, together with however not restricted to shoe manufacturers and different sponsors, brokers, nationwide federations, and race administrators.

Multi-million and billion greenback sportswear manufacturers, for example, have a accountability to each athlete they signal, in addition to a accountability to the operating group as an entire, to make sure their company values and firm mission align with their actions. These manufacturers incessantly market operating to and for everyone whereas concurrently exploiting its prime athletes to color a very rosy picture of the game. Manufacturers must implement measures to vet the protection and well-being of its athletes and the operating group they scout for future expertise. Along with being the best factor to do, it is usually probably the greatest methods to guard their investments.

Girls’s security shouldn’t be a privilege. It’s a fundamental human proper.

Rebecca Cheptegei was a mom, a sister, a daughter, a good friend, a top-tier athlete—and now she is a part of a statistic, an instance of one other lady who has been horrifically failed by a system that would have executed extra to guard her.

These near her hope she turns into an alarming name for motion.