Seeds of Success

PREDICTABLY, the Kenyan team of athletes returned home from the World Indoor Championships in Birmingham with a clutch of medals and in the process posed fresh problems for one of the least enthusiastic gardeners in Africa.

He has got to live with the frustration of knowing that Kenya's athletes will continue to win medals outside of the planting season. This makes extra work for him. The scorching heat and lack of water would soon see off whatever tender young plants he sought to nurture. Already he has a backlog to cater for.

Brother Colm O'Connell of Buttevant in Co Cork is the gardener in question. He is better known as an athletics' coach in Kenya. Curiously he became interested in gardening in much the same way he took up athletics' coaching involuntarily.

He explained, on a recent visit home, that he was drawn to gardening when one of his athletes first won an Olympic gold medal. To mark the achievement Brother O'Connell planted a tree. "We're still planting but it is roses now. We used to plant trees when Peter Rono and people like him won in the '80s."

Then, of course, we thought he would be the one and only. But suddenly another fellow won and we planted another tree and then another tree and finally the boss came to me and said 'you had better do something about this because we are creating a forest outside the door.'

"We said we had better cut it down to shrubs so Wilson Kipketer has only a shrub. We are still planting, but I'm a bit behind because it is hard to keep up with them. And, of course, we can only plant when we can be sure of rain."

Brother O'Connell has worked in Kenya since 1976. He took up a teaching post with the Patrician Brothers in the little village of Iten, in the diocese of Eldoret, high in the mountains in Kenya. He was encouraged to take an interest in athletics by a priest who worked there, Fr Peter Foster, who is a brother to former international athlete and now well-known tv commentator, Brendan Foster.

Fr Peter was about to leave Kenya and invited Bro. Colm to take over the athletics programme he had introduced there. The rest is chronicled in the history of international athletics.

From Olympic champion Peter Rono to world record-holder Wilson Kipketer, Brother Colm supervised a generation of athletes who turned the athletics' world on its head and marched back to Kenya with laurel wreaths on their shoulders and pockets full of money.

Brother Colm, who freely admitted that he was a novice when he first started coaching athletes, acknowledged that the training camp he administers at the St Patrick's school in Iten benefits from a favourable location. But clearly there is a large number of talented youngsters amongst the population as well.

"The population of Kenya was approximately 12m when I went out in 1976, now it's 30m. Kenya for a while had one of the fastest growing population rates in the world."

Eldoret is at 8,000ft about 2,400m which is compared to the highest point in Ireland which is 3,000ft so it is almost three times the height of our highest point," he said. "Some have trouble coping with the altitude, particularly the older people," he elaborated. "I went out when I was a young fellow and I played games, I played tennis and I did jogging and I coached soccer so it wasn't really a problem for me. But older people do have a problem with the altitude because the air is very thin because it is so high.

"Of course to the locals that's no problem because they're born there so that is the natural environment for them. It also has a bit to do with the development of the athletes, of course, because of their lung capacity and the ability of their system to extract oxygen from the air is better than ours in that sense.

"There's thinner oxygen in the air but they have an in-built mechanism that's able to cope with it."

BROTHER COLM was in Birmingham as a member of the coaching team supporting the Kenyans and he is enthusiastically looking forward to the World Cross-Country Championships in Lucerne this weekend. The little village of Iten will be strongly represented.

Said Brother Colm: "What can a fellow say about Kenya they have dominated it for so long that it would be unthinkable to consider that as a team they would be beaten. The trials were held in Nairobi and of the 36 selected I have twelve on the team."

When asked to identify the new stars of Kenya athletics he confidently ran off a handful of names "Viola Kilibiwott who won the World Junior cross country in Dublin last year. She has won it twice, she won it the year before in Ostend. Paula Radcliffe won it once but Viola is the only girl in the world to have won it twice and she will run the 4k in Lucerne."

He predicted good performances as well from the girl who won the junior trials Valentine Koech, who is only 15, and in the senior race Pamela Chepchumba and Magdaline Chemjor, who won the Dublin mini-marathon two years ago.

In the men's section he identified Abraham Cherono, who was a bronze medal winner in the 3,000m steeplechase at the Commonwealth Games in Manchester and Patrick Ivuti. The youngest member of the men's team is Mike Kibiego who is a student at St. Patrick's, Iten.

Brother Colm spoke of the impact the growing army of women athletes will have in the immediate future "A lot of my concentration in the last 10 to 15 year's has been on women's athletics. I would say 75% of Kenya's women's internationals have come our of our system over the last ten years."

For a long time the women were never involved in athletics. If there is any genetic advantage, if there is any environmental advantage, it should apply to women as well. The only thing against them was the taboo of running so that was something that I had to work on for a long time.

"When you train a girl at the same time you must train the parents, in the other sense of the word, to accept what she's doing, that's she's going to competition, she's going to make money, she's going to get exposure in the media, she's going to travel etc. etc. She's not going to follow the normal African expectations of a young girls of 17, 18, 19, marrying and settling down to have a family. So that had to be worked on.

"The great product I have is Sally Barsosia, she won the world 10,000m title in 1997 Athens. I coached her for five years to win the world title and a lot of others as well but training at Iten now is Joyce Chepchumba who won the New York marathon in November."