Tributes are multiplying on Monday after the announcement of the death in a road accident of the marathon world record holder, the Kenyan Kelvin Kiptum, favorite for the Olympic title at the Paris Games this summer.
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The 24-year-old athlete, married and father of two children, died on Sunday evening around 11 p.m. (8 p.m. GMT) near the town of Kaptagat, in the Rift Valley, his home region where he lived and was training, police said.
Kelvin Kiptum was driving a car with two passengers on board: his trainer Gervais Hakizimana, also killed instantly, and a woman who was seriously injured and taken to hospital.
According to a police report consulted by AFP, “he lost control (of the vehicle) and left the road”, driving for “around 60 meters before hitting a large tree”.
Images broadcast by Kenyan media show his car, the windshield smashed and the roof dislocated by the impact.
Kiptum made a thunderous irruption into the marathon world by beating in Chicago last October the world record (2 h 00 min and 35 sec) held by the legend of the discipline, his compatriot Eliud Kipchoge, for the third marathon of his career only.
He had also won the previous two, in Valencia in 2022 and London in 2023.
The Kenyan phenomenon announced that he would attempt to become the first man to run an official marathon under the symbolic two-hour mark in Rotterdam on April 14.
President William Ruto on Monday saluted the memory of “an extraordinary sportsman who left an extraordinary mark” in sport, in a message posted on the social network X. “Kiptum was our future,” he said.
“Promising talent”
This sudden death shook the world of athletics.
Kenyan star Faith Kipyegon, a multiple world and Olympic champion who broke the 1500m and 5000m world records last year, expressed her sadness without words, posting three crying emojis and a Kenyan flag on her X account.
“Kiptum was one of the most exciting new prospects to emerge in road running in recent years,” the international athletics federation said in a statement.
“We are shocked and deeply saddened to learn of the devastating loss of Kelvin Kiptum and his coach Gervais Hakizimana,” said its president Sebastian Coe, paying tribute to “an incredible athlete”. “We will miss him very much,” he concluded.
AFP
“A few days before the Olympic Games, we mourn the premature departure of a promising talent,” declared the president of the Kenyan National Olympic Committee, himself a former marathon runner, Paul Tergat, while the double Olympic champion (2012, 2016) Kenyan 800m David Rudisha regretted “a huge loss” in messages on X.
Goat herder
Kiptum lost his life not far from his training routes and his original village of Chepkorio, about forty kilometers from Eldoret, the mecca of Kenyan running.
He was trained by Rwandan Gervais Hakizimana, whom he had first met in 2013. Hakizimana trained on the roads where Kiptum, then a teenager, tended his herd of goats.
Seven years after their first meeting, he became her full-time coach in 2020.
This death recalls the sudden death of another great Kenyan marathon runner, Samuel Wanjiru, at the same age in 2011, almost three years after his Olympic title in 2008 at the Beijing Olympics.
A forensic doctor ruled it a murder, saying the athlete had fallen from a balcony before being hit in the head with a “blunt object”.
Kenyan athletics was mourned in October 2021 by the murder of one of its long-distance running hopes Agnes Tirop, found stabbed at the age of 25 in her house in Iten, not far from Eldoret. Her husband is being prosecuted for murder.