Lornah Kiplagat: Marathon crusader championscause of African girl power

Judging by her sparkling form of late, Lornah Kiplagat could be the woman to beat in the 27th running of the London Marathon a week today. At the World Cross Country Championships in Mombasa three weeks ago, the Dutch citizen - a native of Kenya - was a decisive winner of the women's 8km race. Tirunesh Dibaba, the Ethiopian prodigy who holds the world titles at 5,000m and 10,000m on the track, finished 24 seconds behind in a rare acquaintance with the role of runner-up.

It was the second time in five months that Kiplagat had taken on the world and finished on top. At the inaugural World Road Running Championships in Debrecen, Hungary, last October she won the women's 20km race in a time of 1hr 3min 21sec. In the process, she claimed the world best time for the distance. It was previously held by someone called Paula Radcliffe.

Having hit the heights of a world-title success twice over, at the ages of 32 and now 33, the flying naturalised Dutchwoman may well have sufficient wind in her sails to carry her in Radcliffe's footsteps as only the seventh female to break through the 2hr 20min barrier for the 26 miles, 385 yards of the marathon. No matter how she fares on the road from Blackheath to The Mall, however, there will be few footsloggers in the 35,000 field for the 2007 Flora London Marathon who have done more to push back any boundaries.

For four years now, Kiplagat has raced on the international stage in the colours of Holland. It has not, though, been an orange vest of convenience. Her husband and coach, Pieter Langerhorst - whom she met on her only previous appearance in the London Marathon, as a pacemaker in 1997 - just happens to be a Dutchman. The couple have settled in the village of Groet, not far from Alkmaar on the North Holland coast. Much of their time, though, is spent back in Kiplagat's homeland.

At Iten, 8,000 feet above sea level in the Rift Valley, they run their High Altitude Training Centre. It was built, in 1999, with the specific intention of giving female Kenyan runners an outlet from the oppressive constrictions of a male-dominated society.

In ploughing her earnings from the road-running circuit into the project, Kiplagat sought to do her bit to halt the enduring tradition of female subservience in Kenya, of women being raised to serve the men in their families and in society.

"Unfortunately, that is still the case," she sighs, taking a break from her London preparations before heading into Alkmaar for a morning track session. "And it's not only in Kenya. It's the same in the whole of Africa.

"When I started running, in 1994, it was very difficult for women in Kenya to make a career out of running. Nobody believed women could do it. It was pretty difficult for me to have a place to stay and concentrate on my training. We always had to go to male-dominated camps.

"Most of the time they just used you to wash their clothes, wash their shoes, and I thought it was not fair.

"I thought, 'If I ever win a lottery or if I ever get some money I want to do something fit for the women in the community'," she continues. "And that is what I did when I won some money in a race in 1997. Immediately, I bought a piece of land, and two years later we started to build.

"This was purely to support women in running. We have about 25 girls who have been successful and each of them has somebody else to support in the house. So the thing is rolling.

"It has given Pieter and I so much satisfaction. We think we did a good job in planting the right seed. We hope it will continue to grow."

One of the runners to blossom has been Hilda Kibet, a cousin of Kiplagat. In January she won the Egmond Half Marathon in Holland, beating Gete Wami, a triple Olympic medallist and former world champion at 10,000m, and Tegla Loroupe, a former winner of the London, New York and Berlin marathons.

Kiplagat's father, who died in 2000, would have been proud of such burgeoning female progress in the family. In contrast to most Kenyan fathers in the Fifties, Sixties and Seventies, he insisted that his daughters be brought up as equals to his sons. He told Lornah he would break her hands if he ever caught her performing chores at the behest of her brothers. He also insisted that Kiplagat and her sisters should not be subjected to the Kenyan tradition of female circumcision.

"I think that gave me the confidence to try to help and change things myself," Lornah reflects. "If I compared my own parents, they were pretty older than those of other girls, parents who were telling them, 'It is tradition'. I was thinking, 'Yeah, but my parents are supposed to be the most traditional and yet they are telling us that this is not a good thing'. So I didn't accept this 'tradition'. People took advantage, calling it that. So, for sure, my parents motivated me.

"I had brothers who were a lot older than me and we were treated the same way; we would do the same things. So I would say, 'Hey, if I don't have to work for my brother, why should I do it for somebody I don't know?'"

Still, in 2007, inequality persists. Happy that their High Altitude Training Centre was offering an equality of job opportunities for fleet-footed Kenyan women, in February this year Kiplagat and Langerhorst launched the Lornah Kiplagat Foundation with the aim of helping to level the educational playing field for Kenyan girls.

"What we are doing now, because the running is going good, is focusing more on education," Kiplagat says. "Lots of families have a lot of children, and in Kenya you have to pay high school fees for them. It is quite a lot of money in Kenya. When a family has five daughters and two boys and they don't have enough money they will prefer to educate the boys and leave the girls at home.

"We think it's not fair. We need to have the right education. Of course, you can't help the whole world, but just by doing a few things you can help to bring the community up.

"So what we are doing now is paying school fees for girls who are unfortunate not to have the money to send them to high school. We have about 10 of them in high school right now and we are seeing lots of improvement in their lives already."

The aim of the foundation is to put 50 girls through the Kenyan high school system. All of which is a formal extension of the broad-scoped philanthropy that has already prompted Kiplagat to fund some of the less successful runners at her training centre on university courses in Europe. One girl has qualified as a mechanical engineer in Germany, another as a physiotherapist in Amsterdam.

A big fat winner's cheque in London next Sunday would help further to expand the horizons of Kiplagat's fellow native countrywomen. And that would give further reason to embarrass the handful of locals in Mombasa who chose to jeer her when she won her world cross country title on Kenyan soil in the orange vest of Holland.

Unlike the army of male Kenyans who are now competing as Qatari athletes, Kiplagat did not switch her nationality for financial gain. She did so because she fell in love with a Dutchman and went to set up home in his country.

"I love it in Holland," she says. "Especially right now, with all the flowers. It's unbelievable. It is a big contrast to life in Kenya. I come from a farm village there. It's opposite. It's like day and night. But of course it's nice that I get to go back to Kenya.

"They are two different worlds," she adds. "Each has its own advantages and disadvantages. I can't just moan when things don't go right in one place or the other. I just try to enjoy the advantages of both worlds. It seems to work."

Indeed it does. After her winning run in Mombasa, Kiplagat stayed in Kenya to train in Iten for a fortnight before returning to Holland. When she finally got back to Dutch soil, there was a mass reception committee awaiting her at Schiphol Airport. "I didn't know that I had so many fans," she says. "The airport was full of people waiting for me. The prime minister was calling me, the queen was sending a fax and calling. Everybody was really, really excited. It was a big surprise - much more than I ever expected."

The first athlete to win a world cross country title for Holland, Kiplagat could now become the first Dutch runner to win the annual marathon held in the city that has a special place in the track-and-field history of her adopted country. It was in London, of course, that Fanny Blankers-Koen won her four Olympic golds in 1948, as a Dutchwoman, a housewife and mother of two, flying in the face of contemporary convention.

Life & Times: From Kenya to the Dutch flyer

Name: Lornah Kiplagat.

Born: 20 March 1974, Kabeimit, Kenya.

Crossing Countries: Became Dutch citizen in July 2003. Married coach Pieter Langerhorst. Lives in Groet, near Alkmaar, Holland.

Achievements: Winner of World Cross Country '07 (runner-up '06); World Road Running Championship (20km) '06; European Cross Country '05. Runner-up in World Half-Marathon '05. Fifth in Olympic 10,000m '04. Fourth in World Championship 10,000m '03. Marathon wins: Los Angeles '97, '98; Amsterdam '99; Osaka '02.

World Records: 10 miles, 50min 54sec, Amsterdam to Zaandam '02 and 50:50, same course '06. 20km, 63:21, World Road Running Championships, Debrecen, Hungary '06. 5km, 14:47, Brunssum, Holland.