Tegla Loroupe

Tegla Chepkite Loroupe (born 9 December 1979) is a Kenyan long-distance track and road runner.

She is also a global spokeswoman for peace, women's rights and education.

Loroupe holds the world records for 25 and 30 kilometers and previously held the world marathon record.

However, after she won a prestigious cross country barefoot race in 1988, this changed.

She began to train to compete internationally the following year, earning her first pair of running shoes in 1989, which she wore only for particularly rough races.

She was nominated for the junior race of the 1989 IAAF World Cross Country Championships finishing 28th.

She competed again at the 1990 IAAF World Cross Country Championships, finishing 16th in the junior race.

Loroupe won the Zevenheuvelenloop 15K race in the Netherland three times (1992, 1993 and 1998).

She is a seven-time Egmond Half Marathon winner (1993–1998, 2000).

She has won the Tilburg road race, a five times (1993, 1994, 1996, 1998, 1999), also a record number.

In 1994 and 1998, Loroupe won the Goodwill Games over 10,000 metres, barefoot.

In 1994, Loroupe ran her first major marathon in New York.

Running against the world's strongest competition, she won.

As a consequence she was idolised by many young people in Africa: at last, a woman champion to complement the many successful male runners.

She has won the Lisbon Half Marathon a record six times: 1994–1997, 1999 and 2000.

She won the Paris Half Marathon in 1994 and 1998, City-Pier-City Loop half marathon in the Hague in 1998, and the Parelloop 10K in race in the Netherlands in 1999

Over the same distance she won bronze medals at the World Athletics Championships in 1995 and 1999.

She won the New York City Marathon again in 1995 and finished 3rd in 1998.

Between 1997 and 1999, she won three world titles a row over the half marathon distance.

She won Rotterdam Marathon three times between 1997 and 1999.

She was the first African woman to hold the marathon World Record, which she held from 19 April 1998 until 30 September 2001.

She is the three-time World Half-Marathon champion.

Loroupe was also the first woman from Africa to win the New York City Marathon, which she has won twice.

She has won marathons in London, Rotterdam, Hong Kong, Berlin and Rome.

She won Berlin Marathon in 1999 and finished second in 2001.

She finished second at the 1999 Osaka International Ladies Marathon.

During the 2000 Summer Olympics in Sydney, favoured to win both the marathon and the 10,000 meters, she suffered from violent food poisoning the night before the race.

In 2016, she was the person organizing the Refugee Team for the 2016 Summer Olympics in Rio.

Tegla Loroupe was born in Kapsait village in the Lelan division of West Pokot District.

It is situated in the Great Rift Valley, approximately 600 kilometres north of Nairobi.

Her father and mother are from the Pokot tribe, a Nilotic ethnic group inhabiting parts of northern Kenya, eastern Uganda and southern Ethiopia.

Loroupe was told by her father that she was useless and her career might be babysitting.

She grew up with 24 siblings.

The Pokots being a polygamous culture, her father had four wives.

She spent her childhood working fields, tending cattle and looking after younger brothers and sisters.

At the age of six, Loroupe started school at Kapsait Elementary school; she had to run ten kilometers to and from school every morning.

At school, she became aware of her potential as an athlete when she won races held over a distance of 800 or 1500 meters against much older students.

She decided to pursue a career as a runner.

However, she was not supported by anyone but her mother.

The Kenyan athletics federation, Athletics Kenya, did not support her at first, thinking Loroupe too small and too thin.