playSam BordenOct 30, 2026, 07:22 AM ETCloseSam Borden is a senior writer for ESPN.com.Multiple AuthorsOpen Extended ReactionsEditor’s note: This story contains graphic descriptions of gender-based violence.This is a story about a Kenyan runner. Her name is Agnes Ngetich. Her smile is wide. Her legs are thin but mighty.
She was discovered by a scout when she was barely a teenager and running barefoot in the countryside because her family couldn’t afford shoes. Now she’s a world champion.Two years ago, Agnes was in Tokyo preparing for a race. She looked at her phone and saw a story going viral: A marathon runner in rural Kenya named Rebecca Cheptegei had been attacked outside her house, allegedly by her ex-boyfriend, after a long-running argument over land ownership. The man ambushed Cheptegei and poured gasoline all over her face and body.
Then he lit her on fire and poured more gasoline on her as she screamed and burned in front of her two children.The brutality of the attack evoked shock and disgust throughout the world. Agnes’ reaction was different. “I saw someone was killed,” she said, shaking her head at the memory. “And I was like, ‘Oh … again?'”She said the word — again? — calmly and evenly.
The resignation in her voice was withering. She sighed.Agnes Ngetich is 25 years old and has everything in front of her. She is already a world-record holder, already a superstar. By all accounts, she will hold a trophy at a major marathon sooner than later.
An athlete her age, with her abilities, is supposed to overflow with hope and buoyancy and light.Instead, she said again. What else could she say when the truth is all around her?The truth that Rebecca Cheptegei was the fourth high-profile female runner in Kenya to be killed in three years, all allegedly by a husband or boyfriend. The truth that studies show more than one-third of Kenyan women say they have experienced gender-based violence firsthand. The truth that her dreams come with a cost.Kenya has a history of extraordinary women runners, and Agnes is the latest in a long line of champions.
But she is also rising in a world where so many hypertalented athletes’ lives have been derailed by a pattern of violence that is systemic, largely undiscussed and critically underregulated in Kenya.”As a lady, it’s not easy,” Agnes said. “It’s scary.”Outside of Kenya, that reality is difficult to see; Kenya’s running dominance is too blinding. At the last world championships, Kenyan women won every single distance event from the 800 meters through the marathon. Kenyan women have won six straight Boston Marathons and 11 of the past 15.
Of the 15 fastest marathon times ever recorded by women, more than half were run by Kenyans.Agnes Ngetich projects to be a legend, a historic champion who follows the lineage of Catherine Ndereba or Mary Keitany or Hellen Obiri. Her form is exceptional, her times eye-popping. “She is the future of Kenyan running,” her French coach, Julien Di Maria, said more than once during our conversations.For Agnes, the biggest question is survival. Because in a country where most live in poverty — the median salary is under $500 per year — and a relentless patriarchy underpins much of the culture, there are no guarantees.
A woman like Agnes — a woman who wins races and earns appearance fees and gets shoe deals — is much more than a fascination.She is a target. For men who want to profit off her. For men who want to take advantage of her. For men who want to control her.Last spring in Philadelphia, a few days before Agnes earned a $50,000 prize for dominating another race, I asked her if she understood her own situation.
If she understood that the more she wins, the more she puts her life in danger. She nodded. And she shrugged.”When you are a success here,” she said. “Everyone wants to be your boyfriend.
Everyone wants to marry you.”‘He kicked the door and threatened to kill me’The weathered arch above the road leading into Iten declares the town in western Kenya as the “Home of Champions.” Joan Chelimo is one of them. She grew up poor, selling charcoal for shillings, and has won numerous elite races, including in Boston, Prague and Seoul. Chelimo is 35 and married to Julien Di Maria, who came to Kenya from Paris in 2012. They wed in 2017, about two years after Joan escaped a relationship in which she said a partner beat her, stole her money and abandoned her when she was pregnant.
Joan doesn’t hide this history but also isn’t inclined to give details. Agnes lives in Kechei, the training camp that Joan and Julien own in Iten, and they are largely responsible for her day-to-day life. Joan calls Agnes “my daughter.” Agnes calls Joan “another mother.”The athletes at the camp ate braised goat and ugali, the popular Kenyan cornmeal starch, on the day I arrived. After eating, Joan and I chatted about the cost of goat meat, the intensity of Kenya’s rainy season and how long it might be before Agnes could start competing in marathons.
We were interrupted by Joan’s phone ringing. Joan got up and paced as she listened to the caller.She asked a few questions in Swahili — “Where are you? Are you safe?” — then listened some more. “An athlete is in trouble,” she told me after she hung up.
“She needs help.”Joan climbed into the driver’s seat of the camp’s white van. It was late now. Many areas in Iten don’t have electricity, and there are few paved roads and no streetlights, so movement after nightfall isn’t common or particularly safe. Still, Joan pulled onto the bumpy dirt trails and tried to follow the woman’s directions.
“Which center did you say is past there?” she asked as the van thudded over muddy potholes. Joan’s cellphone toppled from the cupholders and rattled on the floor. “Take the rough road on the left,” the woman’s voice called out through the speakerphone. The van’s gears grinded and groaned.
Joan parked near a shuttered shed.On foot, she moved slowly down a narrow, pitch-black path that cut through the village farmland. She used her phone’s flashlight to light her way. She rapped on an iron gate, and a man, the woman’s neighbor, opened it and waved her past. A few dim lights glowed inside a squat, slender home with stone walls and a sheet metal roof.
Laundry dangled on strings pulled taut from the fence posts. A child’s plastic scooter lay on its side in the grass. Joan slipped off her shoes and went inside.Medals from races all over the world hung on one wall. The woman who had called sat on a faded sofa, an infant in her arms.
A reality romance show called “Hello Mr. Right Kenya” played on a small TV. “I’ll be your girlfriend!” one of the participants squealed on the screen. The woman asked her young son to go outside for a few minutes so she could talk to Joan.
She didn’t want her son to hear.”Did he really threaten your life?” Joan asked once the boy was outside. She took the woman’s hand. The woman nodded and said her husband hit her often. This last time, she said, he tried to strangle her.
They fought about money, she said, particularly about control of a few small rental homes they purchased with funds the woman had earned from running.The husband “was drunk all the time,” she said, and he told her over and over that she was “foolish.” Joan shook her head. The baby roused and spit up, and the woman dabbed her child’s mouth.”He kicked the door and threatened to kill me,” she said.Joan listened. She asked questions. The boy fidgeted outside on a chilly night.
At one point, the neighbors — an older couple — encouraged the woman to reconcile with the man. These types of issues are best solved at home, they said. Joan interrupted them. She told the woman she would help her find a lawyer and a counselor.
When the woman tried to minimize what had happened to her or suggest that maybe her neighbors were right, Joan frowned.”Do you want to die like Cheptegei?” she asked.’She will go back to him’The red clay roads in Iten rise and fall over rolling hills about 8,000 feet abo
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