The town of Iten, perched on an escarpment in western Kenya 2.4km above sea level, holds an elevated place in the sports world as a training ground for elite long-distance runners. Olympians Lornah Kiplagat, Mary Keitany and Sylvia Kibet have logged hours on the dirt roads that wind through the surrounding fields and forests. The world’s fastest marathoner, Eliud Kipchoge, is one of eight athletes trained in Iten who will be running in the Boston Marathon on April 17.
It was here, on a crisp morning in October 2021, that 26-year-old Agnes Tirop, who had recently set a world record in the women-only 10km road race, was found lying in a pool of blood in her modest bungalow. She had been struck on the head with a garden hoe and stabbed in the neck with a kitchen knife, according to evidence presented in court documents.
The man accused of killing Tirop was her husband. He turned himself in to police a few days later and confessed to beating her after a heated argument about money and infidelity. He has since withdrawn his confession and is awaiting trial.
News of Tirop’s death spread quickly among the hundreds of runners who make Iten their base, many of whom gathered outside her home in disbelief.
But the crime was not an isolated incident.
A Bloomberg Businessweek investigation based on interviews with runners, coaches, managers and police officials found dozens of other cases of alleged domestic abuse, violence and property theft involving women athletes in Iten.
One of them, marathoner Lucy Kabuu, says her former partner, a Nairobi policeman, sold several properties the couple had bought and cheated her out of tens of thousand of dollars.
Six months after Tirop’s murder, Damaris Mutua, another Kenyan runner, was found strangled in Iten. Police suspect she was killed by her boyfriend who fled to Ethiopia.
In November, long-distance runner Lucy Njeri was abducted by hitmen allegedly hired by her husband, according to Kenya’s directorate of criminal investigations. She says her husband targeted her after tensions arose over who owned properties they had purchased together. He didn’t respond to requests for comment.
More than 40% of women in Kenya say they have experienced physical or sexual violence by their husbands or partners, government data show.
The prize money that has flowed into Iten, with lucrative endorsement contracts and bonuses from global sporting companies such as adidas and Nike, has raised the economic stakes.
A woman athlete successful enough to be signed by one of the big shoe brands and deliver consistent results at major races can earn from $500,000 (about R9.2m) to $1m (about R18.4m) a year, a huge amount in a country where about one-third of the population live below the poverty line. In Kenya, roughly 30 top female runners earn more than $100,000 a year. (The winner of the Boston Marathon will take home $150,000.)
The money can be a lure for men who offer their services to young runners as coaches or managers and sometimes marry them. In many cases, they have little formal training or experience but end up having financial control over the women’s lives.
Andolo Munga, local chief inspector of criminal investigations for the national police, had to deal with two murder cases involving women athletes in six months. He says the success of Kenyan runners and the financial power they have obtained confront traditional customs, such as men controlling a family’s wealth and women staying at home to cook and clean. Many families in rural areas, he says, still carry out female genital mutilation and can marry their daughters off at a young age.
Violence against women is largely unreported. “There’s a phobia of making an official, formal report to the government agencies,” Munga says.
“The culture must change its perception.”
That’s what Joan Chelimo, a co-founder of Tirop’s Angels, an advocacy group formed after Tirop’s death to raise awareness about the issue of violence against women, is trying to do.
Her group has filed 12 cases alleging domestic abuse with the police. Those include women who have been hit, slapped, thrown to the ground and had their bank accounts hijacked or property deeds changed. More than 20 women have approached the group for advice about how to deal with abusive partners, she says. Tirop’s case has also attracted international attention, including in the New Yorker.
“Agnes was a huge talent, and her life was captured,” says Chelimo, who finished fifth in last year’s London Marathon and was herself in an abusive relationship. “We promised ourselves, me and my friends, that we don’t want it to happen to any other woman.”
The dirt roads around Iten fill every morning with teams of Lycra-wearing runners training for events ranging from track races to major urban marathons. The big shoe companies don’t have billboards in town, but their merchandise is everywhere — on runners’ feet and in local sports shops.
Running may be Iten’s biggest industry, but most of the 7,000 farmers and shop owners who live here are poor.
The only track, donated years ago by sponsors of the London Marathon to four-time world champion Kiplagat, costs 1,000 Kenyan shillings (about R137) a day to use, way too much for most aspiring athletes. A nearby stadium commissioned eight years ago by the government was never finished and lies in disrepair. Concrete steps are crumbling. The main track was never laid. Instead, the odd runner does laps on a thin mud trail skirted by a ditch.
In the 1970s, as foreign missionaries arrived in the area and established schools, boys took up long-distance running, volleyball and soccer as extra-curricular activities. Young talents were nurtured, and a handful of trainers began having results that spurred others. Eventually, thousands of athletes from the surrounding area poured into Iten, hoping to become Kenya’s next champion.
The husband-coaches, when their wives get money, they want to control the money. That’s where we get most of the challenges
— Elizabeth Keitany, executive member of Athletics Kenya
Colm O’Connell was one of those missionaries. In 1979, the Irish educator approached Sing’ore Girls High School with the idea of enhancing its athletic programme. His efforts paid off. In 1986, Kenya sent a dozen athletes, five of them women, to the Junior World Championships in Athens, Greece. The team won eight medals, including a gold and two silvers for the women. Nine of the athletes were trained by O’Connell.
“Women were not looked upon too kindly in the area of sports,” says O’Connell, 75 and known locally as “the godfather of Kenyan running”. He remembers how many used to run in traditional dresses, as Kenyan society had not yet accepted professional running gear that showed bare skin. While male athletes in Iten recorded successes in the 1960s and ‘70s, the women’s sport took longer to develop.
In 1991, Susan Sirma became the first black African female athlete to win a medal at the World Championships. It was then that people in Iten started to re-evaluate their attitudes towards female athletes. “That was a turning point,” says O’Connell, sitting in a hotel lobby in Iten, wearing a short-sleeved shirt and shades. “Nothing changes attitudes better than money.”
Men, he says, were faced with a challenge: Women were earning their own cash, investing in land and property and, for the first time in the region’s history, becoming breadwinners. “They had to learn to walk behind her, if I can use that term figuratively,” O’Connell says.
Some men — often members of the police or army — took on the role of manager or coach. They would follow the women in cars, shouting times out the window. But several professional coaches say many of them had little understanding of the world of long-distance running.
“When a man is able to drive the career of a woman — drive in terms of suggesting what she has to do, suggesting what is good — tensions can arise,” says Gianni Demadonna, a former marathoner who works as a manager and representative for athletes who have contracts with adidas, as Tirop did.
Demadonna helped Tirop recover after a knee injury in 2021. The injury was caused by domestic abuse, not running, says Victor Koilel, a training partner and close friend of Tirop’s. Demadonna says he was unaware that the injury was the result of domestic violence but knew there were tensions in the marriage, including allegations of abuse.
“I tried to explain to her that the husband was not a correct person for her,” Demadonna says. “But when you go into family affairs, it is not good and you end up fighting with the athletes. He managed the money, he bought a big car, he bought houses, and I think he put the properties in his name. That was the big mistake.”
Demadonna says neither he nor anyone in his team informed adidas of the struggles Tirop faced. “It is not in the business of a company to follow the family affairs of athletes,” he says. “Nobody could think she was in danger to be killed.”
It was Munga, the police inspector, who found Tirop’s body. The runner had missed an early morning training session the previous day and failed to answer her phone or respond to messages. Her family and friends reported her missing.
Police broke a padlock on the front gate and forced their way into her house. “As soon as I entered, I knew something was wrong,” says Koilel, who had been trying to reach his running partner and was with Munga that day. “Blood was creeping into the living room. I ran out of the house and cried.”
Tirop’s husband, Ibrahim Rotich, 44, was arrested a few days later in Mombasa, a 13-hour drive away near the Tanzanian border. He had fled Iten, covered in blood, in his brother’s vehicle, according to the statement he gave police. Rotich’s lawyer didn’t reply to requests for comment.
Hundreds of pages of court documents, including witness statements, reports, affidavits, police logs and investigation files seen by Bloomberg, tell how Tirop went from being an impoverished teenager in a family of 10 to a star.
Born in 1995 in a town west of Iten, Tirop started running in primary school. By age 17, she was participating in international cross-country races. She ran the 5,000m at the World Junior Championships in Spain. In 2016 she quit school to live with Rotich, who was 16 years older. Her father was concerned that Rotich had coerced his daughter into leaving school early and reported the matter to the police. But no action was taken because Tirop was an adult.
The couple bought a plot of land using Tirop’s prize money and built a home in Iten, where they lived with Tirop’s sister Eve. They also purchased several rental properties and land plots, court documents show. Rotich said in his statement that he and Tirop “had a good life since we married” and that they engaged in real estate development projects together.
Over the following years, Tirop won a race in Switzerland and finished on the podium at events in Qatar, Italy and the UK. In 2012 she signed with adidas, which provided her with coaching help and equipment.
But as successes on the track were mounting, so were tensions in her personal life.
In July 2021, when Tirop returned to Kenya from the Tokyo Olympics, where she finished fourth in the 5,000m, the couple began having “domestic wrangles”, according to a police report. On one occasion Rotich hit Tirop and threatened her with a rungu, a wooden baton used in Maasai culture, he admitted in the confession he gave to police after the murder.
Rotich and Tirop’s family also told police that the couple had fought over access to Tirop’s bank accounts as well as ownership documents of a vehicle they had purchased.
Tirop didn’t file a complaint with the police, but after the beating she and her sister went to live with their parents. She told her sister about the incident, according to a statement Eve gave to police after the murder. Tirop also told Koilel.
Koilel said in his statement to police that Tirop told him Rotich had beaten her after she questioned his spending so much money in nightclubs. “She also told me that her husband had intentions of breaking her legs so she could not run again,” he reported. Koilel also says he advised Tirop not to go back to Rotich and regrets not counselling her to go to the police.
Sylvie Kibet, a medallist in the 5,000m at the World Championships and the Olympics, travelled and trained with Tirop when she was younger. In the days leading up to her death, Tirop stayed at Kibet’s running camp in Iten. Kibet remembers how distraught Tirop had become. “I feel like this man was using her,” she says. “I know she felt she had no freedom any more, like she was in custody. She could not talk to anyone, she could not make phone calls, she could not make friends, she could not go out.”
After weeks of trying to make contact with Tirop, Rotich persuaded her to return home, several witnesses told police. On the night of October 11 2021, Eve says, she heard her sister and Rotich arguing until the early hours of the morning. Soon afterward, Tirop was murdered.
“This man pretended to be a coach and manipulated my daughter,” says Tirop’s father Vincent, still raw with grief. “That is the main problem that many athletes are facing.”
Chelimo, a co-founder of Tirop’s Angels, says she was in an abusive relationship until the age of 24. That’s when her partner, a fellow athlete who was also a member of the local police force, found out she was pregnant. She says he threw her out of the house they had built together in Iten and married someone else.
“I left my relationship with nothing,” says Chelimo, who had competed in several international races by then. “I was an athlete, I was making money, but he remained with everything. I didn’t go back. I just walked out and started my life.”
Chelimo is now married to Julien di Maria, an agent scouting talent for adidas. They’ve recently put the final touches on a runners’ camp, featuring a nutritionist and permanent chef, designed to give young female athletes a place where they can concentrate on their careers without having to worry about rent, food or men. She says her Christmas holiday was cut short when she took in a young runner who had been badly beaten by her partner after he demanded access to her bank account.
As Tirop’s Angels began advocating for women’s rights in schools and churches, many men in the area were sceptical, thinking the group was against marriage, Chelimo says. But slowly, through seminars and workshops with male runners, their message that successful female athletes should not be seen as a commodity began to spread, according to several male athletes and coaches in Iten.
Adidas is supporting efforts by Tirop’s Angels to establish safe houses for women, says Stefan Pursche, a spokesperson for the German company. “We are following the events in East Africa with great concern and were devastated by the tragic loss,” he says.
But adidas, like Nike and Asics, has little direct contact with athletes. It pays representatives who own management companies to coach and advise their stars. Pursche declined to say whether adidas was aware of Tirop’s marital difficulties or what action it had taken, if any. “We generally do not comment on bilateral conversations with athletes,” he says.
Critics say this dynamic allows the shoe companies to turn a blind eye to violence, domestic abuse and sexual harassment faced by their runners. “There should be more accountability on brands to help athletes with their lives,” says Jaaziyah Satar, a law resident at Nairobi-based Snolegal, which specialises in gender rights. She says major sports brands are not treating the challenges faced by female athletes in Kenya seriously enough. “As much as they say it’s not their concern,” Satar says, “they could invest in things such as having a legal representative in the camp and be more aware of how the world of athletics works here.”
Spokespeople for Nike and Asics didn’t respond to requests for comment.
Sarah Ochwada, chief counsel at Snolegal, says Kenya’s Sports Registrar, which audits sporting federations, should register every coach, manager and athlete in the country as a way of knowing who is a legitimate professional. She’s also pushing for sports federations to put in place policies on gender-related crimes and to ban anyone who violates them.
One federation, Athletics Kenya, is discussing doing just that. The group conducted a nationwide road trip after Tirop’s death to consult female athletes about their grievances. It found that in some cases coaches would take athletes’ money and husbands would forbid their wives from joining certain management companies.
“The husband-coaches, when their wives get money, they want to control the money,” says Elizabeth Keitany, an executive member of the federation. “That’s where we get most of the challenges.”
Barnabas Korir, head of youth development for Athletics Kenya, says that since Tirop’s death the group has documented three cases of underage athletes being sexually abused by coaches. All three men have since been suspended, and one case is being investigated by the police. He declined to name the athletes or the coaches for reasons of confidentiality.
Kabuu has been waiting years for her case to be resolved. She says she filed numerous complaints against her former partner, Nairobi police officer Jeremiah Wamungu, starting in 2014.
Kabuu met Wamungu in 2008 after she won the 10,000m at Kenya’s national championships. She thought she had found a loyal partner, but as she later learned, Wamungu was married. She now believes he targeted her for her money. “There are those who pretend to be a runner or interested in athletics,” Kabuu says. “But they have other intentions.”
Kabuu had a baby with Wamungu in 2010, then went on to win the New Delhi Half Marathon in 2011. The following year she finished second in the Dubai Marathon, fifth in the London Marathon and third in Chicago.
Her career was flying, and the winnings were adding up. But Kabuu had little control over her earnings, according to court documents in a case brought by Wamungu to obtain half of Kabuu’s properties under what he says are his matrimonial rights.
Don’t put your full trust in your partner. Don’t fear. If you fear, you will be killed
— Lucy Kabuu
On one occasion, Wamungu used the 6m Kenyan shillings Kabuu won in Dubai to build additional floors on a building the couple jointly owned, the documents seen by Bloomberg show. The documents also show that the couple acquired nine properties from 2009 to 2014 in locations around Kenya and that Wamungu sold some of them without Kabuu’s consent.
Kabuu was also forced to leave her home, as her partner “was in the habit of constantly assaulting” her and threatening to shoot her in the presence of their daughter, a court document in the case alleges.
Kabuu says Wamungu pressured her not to work with her manager so he could have full control over her career.
“I had earnings from rental properties before we met that went into my account, but he kept the ATM cards,” Kabuu says. “I wasn’t allowed to talk to anyone. I trained, got into his car and went home.”
Demadonna, who managed Kabuu at the time, confirms she had long suffered in the relationship. “It becomes hard to convince a woman that the husband is not the correct person, is not working in a good way for her but is making his own business,” he says.
Kabuu finished third at the 2014 Tokyo Marathon, but despite her wide smile on the podium, tensions over several properties she had acquired with Wamungu were mounting. When she refused to hand him documents related to the properties, she says, he beat her. She left Wamungu later that year after he filed the lawsuit claiming half of everything she owned.
She is still waiting for a decision. Wamungu filed for divorce even though the couple never married. But earlier this year the court ruled to dissolve their relationship rather than grant a divorce, which would have helped his claim that half of her wealth belongs to him. “I have all the documents to show it was my money that was used to buy the properties,” Kabuu says.
Wamungu says that he helped Kabuu rise to the top of the sport during their time together and that tensions began after others took an interest in her career.
He declined to say if he had ever been violent towards Kabuu. “I cannot say yes or no,” he says. “In Kenya, violence is common. We have a lot of divorces — that is normal, provided you do not kill anybody.”
He says he will respect whatever verdict the court hands down. A pretrial hearing in the case is scheduled for May 26.
Kabuu says she is speaking out as staying silent has not helped the plight of women athletes in Kenya.
“Don’t put your full trust in your partner,” she says. “Don’t fear. If you fear, you will be killed.”
At Vincent and Dinah Tirop’s house near Eldoret, where their daughter’s alleged murderer sits in jail, family members gathered to eat chapatti, drink tea and talk about how Tirop had been a mentor for up-and-coming athletes in the area. One said she had paid for five girls to go to school.
Most mornings, Dinah cleans her daughter’s grave in the family garden. Their loss is aggravated by reminders everywhere they look: the Toyota Hilux that sits in the driveway, the new barn for the cows, the land on which they grow corn, a blue tractor for harvesting. Pictures of Tirop’s athletic exploits are on display in the lounge.
After Tirop’s death, her brother Martin found a small notebook where she had jotted down some of her most memorable performances and times. He says he took a pen and added an entry: “The career was cut while it was starting to be bright and grow. May God replace it with a new star.”
Last month Tirop’s sister Eve entered a 10,000m run near the family home organised by Tirop’s Angels. It was her first race, and she says she was determined to continue her sister’s legacy. She finished 52nd out of more than 250 women who ran in sweltering heat. The men had drunk all the water on tables set up halfway around the circuit, leaving the women parched.
“I had to finish,” she says. “If any woman is having an issue, it’s time to raise the voice.”
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