Rebecca Cheptegei loved chickens. She raised them and collected their eggs every morning. Her family gently joked that she loved them so much.
“She was always laughing,” says her mother, Agnes. “You always knew when she was home.”
Cheptegei had a chicken coop wherever he lived. This year, she built a house in the Kenyan village of Kinyoro, financed by her recent success — she won the Mountain Running World Cup in 2022 and came second in the Florence Marathon last year.
On the afternoon of September 1, while Cheptegei was at church, his ex-partner Dickson Ndiema Marangach entered the chicken coop, with its solid wooden walls. When she returned home, she went outside to check on her animals.
Marangach came out of the chicken coop and poured gasoline in his eyes. As she staggered, he used the gallon of gasoline to douse the rest of her body — and set her on fire.
His 17-year-old sister, Dorcas, ran to help, pulling on Cheptegei’s black jacket, her best church outfit, but fled after being threatened by Marangach’s machete.
“I can’t forget it,” Dorcas said. “I keep dreaming about her asking for help.” Watching from inside were Cheptegei’s daughters from a previous marriage: Joy, 12, and Charity, 9.
When Cheptegei fell to the grass, Marangach approached and poured the rest of the gasoline over her. He was badly burned in the process.
When help arrived, the only parts of Cheptegei that weren’t covered in second- or third-degree burns were his forearms and shins.
“Mommy, why wasn’t there anyone there to save me?” she cried to her pastor, Caroline Atieno, in the hospital that night.
In the first 24 hours, Cheptegei was able to speak and describe the attack.
She got worse over the next few days. One by one, his organs stopped working.
While he could still speak, Cheptegei repeated two things in Swahili.
“Why couldn’t Dickson see one good thing in me, so he wouldn’t do this?”
“Who will take care of my children?”
Cheptegei died four days after being attacked. She was 33 years old.
Marangach died from his own burns on September 10.
Most Kenyan runners train in the town of Iten, near Eldoret. It sits above the Great Rift Valley on an escarpment 2,400 meters high, the thin air and network of trails producing a regular stream of Olympic medalists. In Kenya, it has been named “the home of champions”. In recent years, it has become known for something else.
Cheptegei’s family hung a poster on the living room wall. It says “Fighting for Victims of Femicide” and lists four names.
- Rebecca Cheptegei — although born and competing in Uganda, she had lived in Kenya since she was 2 years old.
- Damaris Muthee Mutua — strangled in Iten in April 2022. Born in Kenya, she represented Bahrain internationally. Police named her boyfriend, Eskinder Folie, as the main suspect, but he fled to his home country of Ethiopia and efforts to capture him were unsuccessful.
- Edith Say it — 27-year-old sprinter killed in October 2021. Her husband was charged in connection with her death in 2022 and the case continues.
- Agnes Tirop — stabbed to death the same week as Muthoni, a month after breaking the 10,000 meter world record in Germany. Her husband and trainer, Ibrahim Rotich, confessed to assaulting her in a heated argument and later pleaded not guilty to her murder. The case is also ongoing.
“She was a pure talent,” Janeth Jepkosgei, a former 800-meter world champion and Olympic silver medalist, said of Tirop. “She could have been an Olympic champion.”
Although the legal process is at different stages in the four cases, there is an apparent pattern: Each female athlete was killed following a financial dispute involving her partner. Speaking to athletes in Iten, everyone fears they won’t be the last.
Jepkosgei alluded to a well-known control system in Kenyan athletics.
“There are these guys who prey on these talented girls and pretend to be coaches,” said Violah Lagat, an athlete whose brother, Bernard, won two world championship gold medals competing for the United States. “Ninety percent of the time, we athletes come from very vulnerable backgrounds. Our parents don’t have enough money or enough food, they can’t provide the girls with pads. These men initially provide that.”
Athletics in Kenya is a route out of poverty. The male and female winners of this month’s New York City Marathon won $100,000 [R$ 581 mil, na cotação atual]15 times the average Kenyan’s salary, but performing well in local races can provide a comfortable lifestyle. Around 30 runners earn more than US$100,000 a year, in a country where a third of the population lives below the poverty line. With most athletes coming from poor rural backgrounds, they will invariably never have handled such large sums of money.
“In many cases, these men are gradually manipulating someone into putting all their trust in them,” Lagat said. “Then control happens — how they’re training, who they’re seeing, what they do with their earnings.”
Tirop’s Angels, which Lagat co-founded with athlete Joan Chelimo, is a charity run by current athletes that provides counseling and safe havens for people facing domestic abuse.
According to the institution, three out of every four women it supports have contemplated suicide because of their situation.
To get to Cheptegei’s family home, you take the highway from Eldoret in far western Kenya towards the town of Kitale. It’s close to the border with Uganda, where Cheptegei’s parents fled ethnic violence in the early 1990s. From Kitale, it’s a smaller road to the small village of Endebess.
These roads are good for training, gentle on the knees, undulating on the legs and high on the lungs.
Cheptegei was seen as a talented runner at age 7. She chose to represent Uganda after failing to secure a place at a youth camp in Kenya and was supported in her training by the country’s army. After a short period in Uganda, she returned to Kenya to higher training facilities. There, she met Marangach.
His friend Emmanuel Kimutai said: “He was a boda-boda man”, a kind of motorcycle taxi driver, “but he pretended to be a coach.”
“He started out escorting the runners on his motorcycle, carrying drinks,” Kimutai said, “but when he realized Rebecca wasn’t in a relationship, he took advantage.”
The problems began when Cheptegei decided to buy his own motorcycle to take his children Joy and Charity to school. According to the family, Marangach was the one who bought the motorcycle using Cheptegei’s money, but put the vehicle in his name. When the athlete complained, the man threatened her.
“He kept repeating the same warnings to Rebecca,” Agnes said. “He said he would mutilate your ears, mutilate your nose, mutilate your genitals.”
On one occasion, her brother Jacob, an 18-year-old elite racer, borrowed the motorcycle, with his sister’s permission, for a race in Uganda. He said he was chased by Marangach and three of his friends and had to flee, hiding in a eucalyptus tree to avoid being beaten.
Meanwhile, Cheptegei was winning races and, as a result, earning more than US$50,000 (R$290,000) a year.
“Dickson saw the money coming into the bank account and had the password,” said Cheptegei’s father, Joseph. “He spent it however he wanted. Rebecca wasn’t comfortable with that, so in April, she went to the bank to change the number.”
“After realizing Rebecca had done this, Dickson came home furious with a machete. Her phone was charging, and he cut it off with the machete. She fled the house in Kinyoro and reported it to the police.”
In the spring, Cheptegei and Marangach separated, but he continued to insist that the land was in his name, taking his new partner to the house and refusing to leave. The police detained him, but he was back within a month, this time trying to change the locks.
“She called the police at Kinyoro again, but the officer said he was tired of all the complaints at this property and didn’t want to hear any more about her domestic arguments,” Joseph said.
Asked about the handling of Cheptegei’s case, Jeremiah ole Kosiom, county commander of Trans Nzoia police, said in a telephone call: “As a senior officer, no report has reached me from my subordinates. The investigation is ongoing.”
Abuse of women is a problem throughout Kenyan society. According to a 2022 government survey, about 40% of Kenyan women between the ages of 15 and 39 have faced physical abuse.
In 2019, a government survey reported that one in six Kenyan women had experienced sexual violence before turning 18.
“Many girls are sexually violated because they go for a massage before a race and say they have 300 shillings [R$ 13]”, said Lagat. “Then they are told: ‘No, there are 500’ [R$ 22] — but if you’re preparing for a race and this is your chance, you can avoid the extra 200 if you do something else.”
That “something else” could include doping. According to the World Anti-Doping Agency, 44% of positive tests for erythropoietin, or EPO, come from Kenya. With high levels of exploitation by partner trainers desperate to maximize income, there is an added incentive to gain any advantage.
“I know two runners whose husbands were the ones who helped them get the drugs,” said Chelimo Saina, who runs a support group for victims of domestic abuse. “It’s whatever makes them win. And, of course, they’re using the athlete’s money to achieve that.”
Jackson Tuwei, chairman of Athletics Kenya, an executive committee, acknowledged the possible connection.
“We have started an enhanced anti-doping program and we want to register all our coaches to know who is a real coach and who is not,” he said. “One of the recommendations is to increase the number of female trainers, and this will also help address the issue of gender-based violence.
“A well-trained coach wouldn’t do the things we’re hearing about. We want to eliminate those who aren’t.”
Seeking Responsibility
Athletics is big business in Kenya, and the question of who is responsible for what is happening to female athletes is a pertinent one.
Martin Tirop, Agnes’ brother, said she had reported what she was experiencing to Athletics Kenya the year before her death, “but no one helped her.”
Tuwei said gender-based violence “continued to happen at a rate that we cannot accept. For this to happen, and particularly to happen to a top female athlete, is very painful, and so we decided that we cannot accept this kind of thing. But we know that happened repeatedly after that.”
Athletics Kenya introduced several new policies this year, including a six-person panel — four women and two men — where gender-based violence and other protection issues can be reported.
The New Generation
At Cheptegei’s house, the rain threatens to block the roads and Jacob has training the next day.
Rebecca recognized her brother’s talent and passed on tips.
“She always told me I needed to eat after the sessions or my body would become weak,” he said. “Ugali, eggs, chicken, of course, even chapati and tea.”
Jacob lowered his head shyly.
“When it gets hard, I just remember her telling me to keep going, even when the body says I can’t,” he said.
The suffering is visible. Since the attack, Charity has been too traumatized to return to school, but will try again after the holidays. She whispered that she wants to be an English teacher when she grows up. Rebecca’s daughter, Joy, is also talented and clearly a fast runner.
The family hopes that Joy will become an athlete. They also hope Kenya changes before she does.
