In both 19, at the first and second African Games, he was champion at 1500m and 5000m. At the 1964 Summer Olympics in Tokyo, he represented Kenya in their first games as an independent nation, finishing fifth in the 5000m. His first international exposure was when he made the Kenyan team for the 1962 Commonwealth Games in Perth, Australia, where he came 11th in the Three Miles.
Kip began his international career in 1962 when he set a Kenyan record in the Mile. All of this physical activity, done in bare feet and at high altitude, laid the foundations for a career as a distance runner.īut in the early 1960s, athletics was still purely an amateur sport, so getting started for a poor Kenyan boy was challenging. When he wasn’t running to school and back, Keino was often sent out to herd the family’s goats, which could involve trotting around after them for hours at a time. I did this every day until I left school.’ ‘Then I ran home for lunch, again for afternoon school and back at the end of the day. ‘I ran in my bare feet four miles to school in the morning,’ he once said. Like many children in rural Kenya, when he started primary school he had to run to get there. When he was still very young, both his parents died and so he was brought up by his aunt.A member of the Nandi tribe, after finishing school, he joined the Kenya Police worked as a physical training instructor before becoming an athlete. Keino’s father, a long-distance runner, encouraged his son in the sport. In his local language, the name ‘Kipchoge’ means ‘born near the grain storage shed’. Kip Keino byname of Hezekiah Kipchoge Keino was born on Januin Kipsamo in the Nandi Hills in the Western Kenya. Kip is best known for his training at 1800m above sea level, which helped to introduce high-altitude training as a technique to improve running time at any altitude. In 2012, he was one of 24 athletes inducted as inaugural members of the IAAF Hall of Fame.He was the President of the Kenyan Olympic Committee until 2017. In 2000, he became an honorary member of the International Olympic Committee (IOC). That drive and single-minded determination to succeed against the odds has today made him one of the great benefactors to underprivileged children in Kenya. His courage and determination in winning a gold and silver medal in the Mexico City 1968 Summer Olympic Games, despite suffering from a gallbladder infection, endeared him to sports lovers around the world. He was one of the early role models who inspired the great Kenyan tradition of distance running. One of Kenya’s greatest Olympic athletes, Kipchoge Keino, universally known as ‘Kip’, is one of the world’s most admired sporting heroes.
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