Toni Reavis posted: " If history doesn't repeat itself note for note, it's been said to at least rhyme verse to verse. This November 2021, the TCS New York City Marathon celebrated its 50th running. Among those the New York Road Runners inducted into its Hall of Fame was 1"
If history doesn't repeat itself note for note, it's been said to at least rhyme verse to verse.
This November 2021, the TCS New York City Marathon celebrated its 50th running. Among those the New York Road Runners inducted into its Hall of Fame was 1987 champion Ibrahim Hussein, the first Kenyan to win the five-borough race. Ibrahim was also the first African to win Boston (1988, '91, '92) and Honolulu (1985-`87).
1987 & 1970 NYCM champions, Ibrahim Hussein & Gary Muhrcke, inducted into NYRR Hall of Fame
After Hussein, the deluge. With wins by Albert Korir and Peres Jepchirchir in 2021, 16 Kenyan men and 13 Kenyan women have now won in NYC, the most by any nation.
Beyond the individual Kenyan athletes' talent and drive, and the inspiration from athletes like Hussein, one of the often overlooked factors in Kenya's long domination of distance running has been the stability it has achieved politically since gaining independence from Great Britain in 1963 following 75 years of colonial rule.
Except for a short two-month spasm of violence following the controversial presidential election of December 2007, when long-standing tribal land disputes erupted into 1000 deaths and hundreds of thousands more dislocations, Kenya has remained largely free of the political strife that has consumed many of its East African neighbors.
Somalia offers an opposite trajectory. After winning the 1500m gold medal at the 1987 IAAF World Championship in Rome, George Mason University grad Abdi Bile became a national hero in Somalia.
The vision of Bile holding the blue and white Somali flag on high as he ran a lap of honor in Rome was surely a harbinger of what successes lie ahead.
But Bile's victory in Rome coincided with Somalia's descent into anarchy at home. Thus, his celebration in Rome offered but a temporary high point set against the nation's downward spiral. In the ensuing years, Somalia has sunk deeper into a failed state, hardly a base from which athletes can rise and flourish.
Great Britain's Mo Farah and America's Abdi Abdirahman are two examples of young Somalis fortunate enough to have escaped their war-torn country to find success under other flags.
"If I would have stayed, the odds are I wouldn't be alive today," Abdi once told me.
Just as I've often wondered who were the great Kenyan runners that we never heard of before Kip Keino came to fame in Mexico City 1968, because the system was not in place to discover them at the time, how many potentially great Somali runners do we not know today because of the country's political instability?
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