Tegla was only seven years old when she started running. At first, running was what she had to do, to be at school on time, to be back at home helping her mother, 10 kilometres to school and back, every day without the blessing of her father to be educated.
Running 10 kilometres still wasn’t enough. Tegla took on older pupils in school races and beat them. It was as though she did not want any race to end. When the opportunity came up to run in an established cross-country barefoot race, Tegla decided to take part. Without a care in the world and without expectation, she ran for the sheer joy of it. She won. The Kenyan athletics federation noticed and soon gave Tegla a chance to represent her country at the International Amateur Athletic Federation (IAAF) World Junior Cross Country Championships. A top 30 finish was good enough to convince Tegla and Kenya that she had a future in running.
As a young woman approaching her twenties, Tegla had no idea at that point how much running would change her own and others’ lives. To her as a teenager, running meant pleasure, freedom, a chance for education, an escape from an early marriage. Running could put distance between her and the cattle and parched soil of her home in the mountains of West Pokot county. Running could take her somewhere. Tegla’s father didn’t see it, but her mother knew it. For Tegla, running was more than a gift of speed, endurance and escape. Shoes on, shoes off, it didn’t matter. When she ran, she felt at peace with herself and everyone around her.
Astonishing success followed. In 1994, completely unknown and coming from far behind the leading runners, Tegla became the first African woman to win the New York marathon. The New York marathon! She crossed the finish line, breaking the tape, at least three minutes ahead of the field. Sole-less 10,000m victories in the 1994 and 1998 Goodwill Games led to even more remarkable achievements before the Nineties were done. Tegla claimed not one but three world half-marathon titles and held track world records at 20,000m, 25,000m and 30,000m. She achieved a fifth place in the 10,000m at the 2000 Sydney Olympics, but truly excelled in the city marathons, winning in London, Rome and Lausanne.
When injury made Tegla’s days of breaking the tape less likely, her thoughts returned to a childhood dream of becoming a peacemaker, a dream now matured and developed by running. Not much had changed in Kenya and neighbouring countries since her youth. Fighting between tribes and communities over scarce resources – land, animals, crops, water – was still common. If anything, the creeping impact of climate change was making raids, rustling and revenge more likely among Africa’s most impoverished nomadic communities.
Tegla believed she could stop male warriors in Kenya and east Africa from fighting each other and run for peace instead.
Kapenguria is the largest town in her home county of West Pokot, a few miles form the Ugandan border. It was here, in 2003, that Tegla set up the inaugural race for peace. It remains an extraordinary fact that in her first initiative in philanthropy, she persuaded 3,000 warriors from six Kenyan tribes to put down their weapons and compete peacefully.
By establishing the Tegla Loroupe Peace Foundation in 2003, the girl from West Pokot ensured that the goodwill and the suspension of hostilities were not temporary either. As early as 2004, Tegla raised the necessary funds and backing to build the Warriors Training Centre, a place where tribesmen could replace their raiding skills with new ones in farming, in managing livestock and in education as well as sport.
Recognising that, for peaceful change to evolve at every level of the community, she had to go much further by building up a series of annual events across the region for different groups such as: the Children Under 10 race; the Women’s 10K; the Reformed Warriors 10K; even a Dignitaries 2K race.
The peace races have also embraced those struggling for an existence and recognition in refugee camps. Again, Tegla saw an opportunity to do more, to go one step further, this time to align with a core principle of the Olympic Charter that ‘the practice of sports is a human right’. It is largely because of her and her Peace Foundation that refugee athletes competed for the first time in history at an Olympic Games in Rio de Janeiro in 2016.
The net result has been that in a little over 20 years Tegla Loroupe, the running philanthropist, has demonstrated that a peaceful solution can be found for the most enduring problems where distrust and division have been so deeply ingrained, where people have been fighting each other for their very survival for generations, where others have been excluded.
Over time, and quite apart from being a compelling celebration of peaceful co-existence, Tegla’s peace races have become social occasions, platforms for dialogue, cultural exchanges, and sources of pride, steps to peace from the first to the last across the line, breaking the tape.