By: Grace Liu

The Ugandan team has been getting better and better at distance running, and so has their star athletes, Joshua Cheptegei and Jacob Kiplimo.

At the 2017 World Cross Country Championships, Cheptegei was aiming for gold like his teammate Kiplimo did before in the under 20 race. But, the other runners from better cross country teams, Kenya and Ethiopia, beat him, and Joshua finished 30th out of 136 runners.

Cheptegei kept on working, and in 2019, he won the World Cross Country Championships in Denmark, helping Uganda take the team title.

Since then, Cheptegei has won a gold Olympic medal, and has two World Championship titles. Kiplimo also holds the half-marathon world record. Other Ugandan runners, Halimah Nakaayi and Peruth Chemutai have gotten World Championship titles, and Olympic gold medals.

“Every year, as a country, we’re getting better and better,” Cheptegei said. Uganda has won 105 Olympic medals since 1964 in running events.

Ugandan runners are thriving now, though their talent took time to develop. Kenya had stability after it gained its independence in 1963, but Uganda was mostly at war during the 70s and 80s.

Uganda was also slow to modernize. Up until the 1990s, the relatives of Ugandan runners lived in forest environments, and depended on hunting for survival.

However, a lot changed when these runners were born. In 1983, the government resettled the group of hunters to make way for national parks. In their new location, children could go to school and have access to competitive sports. It was after this modernization period that Ugandan runners appeared at World Championships and the Olympics.

Uganda’s first champion of this time period was Dorcus Inzikuru, who earned a World Championship title in 2005. Seven years later at the 2012 London Olympics, Stephen Kiprotich won a gold medal in the Olympics, the country’s first since 1972.

Many Ugandans were inspired by Kiprotich, including Cheptegei. Seven years after Kiprotich, Cheptegei became a national icon.

Cheptegei is now training for the World Championships in Budapest. He said that he was very grateful of the journey that his country has taken, despite the rare occasion that things didn’t turn out in their favor.

“It’s one of those incidents that built me mentally,” he said referring to the 2017 race in Kampala. “I had two options: Allow it to break me; or gather myself together and build an inspirational story.”

Link to article: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/12/sports/jacob-kiplimo-joshua-cheptegei-uganda.html