EVANS CHEBET
After years as a runner up on the big stage, Evans Chebet has finally reached the top. Bill Donahue discovers the strong foundations and self-belief that have taken the 34-year-old Kenyan all the way
Before he became only the third man this century to win both the Boston Marathon and New York Marathon in the same year
– which he achieved in 2022 – before he successfully defended his Boston title this year against a star-studded field that included the GOAT, Eliud Kipchoge, and long before he built his mother a lavish new home, Evans Chebet rented a small concrete house for £9 a month about 45 miles south of Kondabilet, the tiny mountain village in Kenya where he grew up. There was nothing in the home’s single room apart from a stool and an old table. Chebet cooked outdoors – usually nothing more than vegetables and ugali (a traditional Kenyan maize porridge) – and in the long hours between training sessions, he would sit outside and stare out at the red dirt and evergreen forests of the Kenyan highlands.
It was 2007. Chebet was a 19-year-old aspiring distance runner and he’d come to seek his fortune. He was living outside Kaptagat, a town of about 2,500 people, hoping to work his way into Kenya’s talent pipeline. Virtually all Kenyans who race internationally, including Kipchoge, live in spartan high-altitude training camps in Kenya’s Upper Rift Valley, sleeping in tiny unadorned rooms and sharing housekeeping chores and communal meals. Chebet was trying to gain entry to a camp run by Rosa & Associates, an Italian sports management company.
Although he grew up with few financial resources, he was now – thanks to an uncle’s largesse – rubbing shoulders with running’s greats. ‘I was so happy to be there,’ he says. But Chebet was hardly a shining prospect. He’d never raced on the track. Indeed, he’d scarcely raced at all, and he was resigned to waiting outside the Rosa camp and tagging along on the athletes’ brisk morning workouts. ‘I’d start out with the frontrunners, trying to show my talent,’ he says. ‘But then I’d get dropped.’
Though Kenya has flourished economically over the past decade, more than 36% of the population still lives below the poverty line, according to the World Bank. There were — and still are — hundreds of impoverished young men and women who haunt the locked gates of Kenya’s elite training camps, harbouring ragged dreams of stardom and wealth earned with their legs. Few succeed, but in 2008, a young Italian coach with Rosa & Associates, Claudio Berardelli, saw something in Chebet and invited him in. ‘He was just a you
