Ab-Titchaz
JF-Expert Member
- Jan 30, 2008
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The Africa weightlifting champion who chose to become a mechanic
Off the road from Athi River to Namanga at Kitengela is a small motor vehicle garage that, at first sight, seems to be crying for business.
Inside that garage works a young man named Evans Murutu, and at first sight he does not strike you as your usual mechanic. Other than the coverall he is wearing, everything about him tells you that his heart lies elsewhere, far, far away from the dusty plains of Kitengela.
Murutu, 22, spends his days hammering cars into shape, but this, he believes, is not what he was born to do. Back in his small house hangs a prized possession: a single gold medal that he won at the second Africa Youth Games in Gaborone, Botswana, in May last year. That victory, and two other gold medal finishes at the same meet, planted in his young mind the idea that he was destined for great stuff, but it seems he dreamed too big, because Gaborone also gave him the biggest heartbreak of his young life.
LOFTY AMBITIONS
This is a story about a young man with lofty ambitions, a big heart, a powerful frame, and shattered dreams. It started in Kitengela, but Kitengela is actually the end of the story. The proper start of the story is last year, when Murutu travelled to Botswana as part of Team Kenya to participate in the continental championship, which was also a qualifier to the Youth Olympics held in China in August the same year.
The challenges he faced on the journey to Gaborone notwithstanding, he floored his opponents in the Under-69 kg weightlifting category to emerge the best; winning gold in the Snatch and Clean and Jerk categories and being crowned the overall winner - a feat that guaranteed him another gold medal.
His superb performance in a field event was sweet victory not just for him, but also for Kenya, a country known more for track than field events. For him, however, it was an even sweeter accomplishment, for even though he had travelled to Gaborone as part of the Kenyan delegation, the journey there had always been a solo event for him.
He had struggled alone at home, training in a makeshift gym and lifting all manner of jua kali weights, to get there. The State had not given him the essentials to be the best, and no one had ‘discovered' him. Murutu had discovered himself, lifted the heaviest weights he could, and qualified to travel to Gaborone. And there, like the self-made star that he is, he had grunted his way to three podium finishes.
The future could only be bright for the young man who had been brought up in squalor back in Nairobi. The journey to Botswana, just like the journey through his life, was a series of missteps and disappointments. Alongside coach John Ogolla, also the Kenya Amateur Weightlifting Association (Kawa) secretary-general, Murutu had been forced to travel by road from Zambia to Botswana after landing at the Lusaka International Airport later than scheduled - courtesy of a delay in Nairobi - and being informed that their connecting flight to Gaborone had left much earlier.
The pain, however, paid off, and Murutu automatically earned himself a place in the Kenya team to China, just three months away. He travelled to Beijing soon after landing back in Kenya, but even though he did not make it to the medal bracket, a small light had started lighting up at the farthest end of his tunnel.
But that light started dimming immediately he came back home from Beijing. For some reason, he had hoped that he would be assimilated into the ranks of the Kenya Amateur Weightlifting Association as well at the National Olympics Committee of Kenya, but it would take him less than a week to realise he had hoped amiss.
FEW OPTIONS
Still, the accolades kept flowing in. At the end of the year, Safaricom, the chief sponsor of the Sports Personality of the Year Awards (Soya), feted him as a promising sports personality of the year, honoured him with a trophy and gave him a Sh20,000 cash award. He was also feted by Nock as the top achiever in the junior weightlifting category, but there was no cash prize.
Murutu admits that he had hoped an athletics career would feed him and his family. He had trained so hard to beat the poverty he had been brought up in, but it had started dawning on him that he could not make a meaningful life out of this.
Having dropped out of school in Form One for lack of school fees, he did not have many options to better his life. Time was flying by quite fast, and the 22-year-old needed to make the most difficult decision of his life: quit competitive weightlifting and seek a better future elsewhere.
"When I first started lifting weights I was driven by an inner passion and the exploits of Roonie Coleman," Murutu told us last week inside the small Kitengela garage where he now tries to make ends meet, with Gaborone and Beijing nothing but distant pasts in his life.
Coleman is the retired American professional body builder and winner of the prestigious Mr Olympia body building title eight years in a row. He is also regarded as the greatest body builder of all time.
"I thought winning a gold medal would change my life for the better, and so I put all my energy into it. I weighed 69 kilos when I travelled to Gaborone, and there I lifted 82 kilos in the Snatch category." That, though, was a minor feat compared to the 105 kilos he lifted in the Clean and Jerk category.
That fleeting moment of being on top of the world, however, brought him a loss he is yet to understand. While he won three gold medals in Botswana, Murutu was only honoured with one medal and told the rest would be sent to him in Nairobi.
That pledge is yet to be honoured, and the steal has added to the young man's disenchantment with local competitive sport.
"When I returned home, my friends at the garage mocked me," he said last week. "They would tell me to share with them the millions I had earned from winning the medals, but I had nothing to show for it. I had wasted my time travelling to all these places instead of concentrating on what put food on my table."
Murutu, however, seems to have hoped for too much - and thrown in the towel too easily. The junior championships, for instance, do not attract any monetary gain, and maybe had he staked it out and joined the senior team he would have landed his big break.
For instance, at the recently concluded Athletics World Championships in China, gold medal winners received a Sh6 million cash award per event.
But Murutu did not have the patience - and maybe the time - to wait for the windfall. He expected the transformation to be instant, the accolades to come with tangible benefits.
BIG BREAK
And you cannot blame him; his family looked up to him for the big break, he was at that stage in one's life when one starts putting the lego pieces together, and he was about to marry his girlfriend, Miriam Waithera Mwangi, who is now two months pregnant.
With such heavy loads resting on his shoulders, the garage seemed to be a more attractive proposition. Here he was guaranteed of at least Sh300 daily, as well as the camaraderie of his colleagues.
He still pays the Sh300 annual membership fee to train at the Kitengela Community Gym, but he does not think he will be representing Kenya in any weightlifting meeting any time soon. His priorities have changed, his focus shifted.
"I still lift weights, but not for sport," he said. "I lost hope because of the way I was treated. It was not what I had expected. Life has changed and it is now time for me to move on. I have never received my medals from Gaborone, and that's quite demoralising."
Speaking to DN2 on phone from Congo, Brazzaville, where he is leading a team of Kenya weightlifters at the ongoing All Africa Games, Kawa secretary general John Ogolla said his team had "followed up the issue" of Murutu's missing medals but Coja, the games' organising committee, had never met their end of the bargain.
Nock secretary Stephen Soi said Murutu's case was beyond Kenya's interventions as the local organising committee in Botswana had long been disbanded.
"At the moment… the position is that the organisers should have brought the medals. There is nothing we can do," he said.
Daily Nation
Off the road from Athi River to Namanga at Kitengela is a small motor vehicle garage that, at first sight, seems to be crying for business.
Inside that garage works a young man named Evans Murutu, and at first sight he does not strike you as your usual mechanic. Other than the coverall he is wearing, everything about him tells you that his heart lies elsewhere, far, far away from the dusty plains of Kitengela.
Murutu, 22, spends his days hammering cars into shape, but this, he believes, is not what he was born to do. Back in his small house hangs a prized possession: a single gold medal that he won at the second Africa Youth Games in Gaborone, Botswana, in May last year. That victory, and two other gold medal finishes at the same meet, planted in his young mind the idea that he was destined for great stuff, but it seems he dreamed too big, because Gaborone also gave him the biggest heartbreak of his young life.
LOFTY AMBITIONS
This is a story about a young man with lofty ambitions, a big heart, a powerful frame, and shattered dreams. It started in Kitengela, but Kitengela is actually the end of the story. The proper start of the story is last year, when Murutu travelled to Botswana as part of Team Kenya to participate in the continental championship, which was also a qualifier to the Youth Olympics held in China in August the same year.
The challenges he faced on the journey to Gaborone notwithstanding, he floored his opponents in the Under-69 kg weightlifting category to emerge the best; winning gold in the Snatch and Clean and Jerk categories and being crowned the overall winner - a feat that guaranteed him another gold medal.
His superb performance in a field event was sweet victory not just for him, but also for Kenya, a country known more for track than field events. For him, however, it was an even sweeter accomplishment, for even though he had travelled to Gaborone as part of the Kenyan delegation, the journey there had always been a solo event for him.
He had struggled alone at home, training in a makeshift gym and lifting all manner of jua kali weights, to get there. The State had not given him the essentials to be the best, and no one had ‘discovered' him. Murutu had discovered himself, lifted the heaviest weights he could, and qualified to travel to Gaborone. And there, like the self-made star that he is, he had grunted his way to three podium finishes.
The future could only be bright for the young man who had been brought up in squalor back in Nairobi. The journey to Botswana, just like the journey through his life, was a series of missteps and disappointments. Alongside coach John Ogolla, also the Kenya Amateur Weightlifting Association (Kawa) secretary-general, Murutu had been forced to travel by road from Zambia to Botswana after landing at the Lusaka International Airport later than scheduled - courtesy of a delay in Nairobi - and being informed that their connecting flight to Gaborone had left much earlier.
The pain, however, paid off, and Murutu automatically earned himself a place in the Kenya team to China, just three months away. He travelled to Beijing soon after landing back in Kenya, but even though he did not make it to the medal bracket, a small light had started lighting up at the farthest end of his tunnel.
But that light started dimming immediately he came back home from Beijing. For some reason, he had hoped that he would be assimilated into the ranks of the Kenya Amateur Weightlifting Association as well at the National Olympics Committee of Kenya, but it would take him less than a week to realise he had hoped amiss.
FEW OPTIONS
Still, the accolades kept flowing in. At the end of the year, Safaricom, the chief sponsor of the Sports Personality of the Year Awards (Soya), feted him as a promising sports personality of the year, honoured him with a trophy and gave him a Sh20,000 cash award. He was also feted by Nock as the top achiever in the junior weightlifting category, but there was no cash prize.
Murutu admits that he had hoped an athletics career would feed him and his family. He had trained so hard to beat the poverty he had been brought up in, but it had started dawning on him that he could not make a meaningful life out of this.
Having dropped out of school in Form One for lack of school fees, he did not have many options to better his life. Time was flying by quite fast, and the 22-year-old needed to make the most difficult decision of his life: quit competitive weightlifting and seek a better future elsewhere.
"When I first started lifting weights I was driven by an inner passion and the exploits of Roonie Coleman," Murutu told us last week inside the small Kitengela garage where he now tries to make ends meet, with Gaborone and Beijing nothing but distant pasts in his life.
Coleman is the retired American professional body builder and winner of the prestigious Mr Olympia body building title eight years in a row. He is also regarded as the greatest body builder of all time.
"I thought winning a gold medal would change my life for the better, and so I put all my energy into it. I weighed 69 kilos when I travelled to Gaborone, and there I lifted 82 kilos in the Snatch category." That, though, was a minor feat compared to the 105 kilos he lifted in the Clean and Jerk category.
That fleeting moment of being on top of the world, however, brought him a loss he is yet to understand. While he won three gold medals in Botswana, Murutu was only honoured with one medal and told the rest would be sent to him in Nairobi.
That pledge is yet to be honoured, and the steal has added to the young man's disenchantment with local competitive sport.
"When I returned home, my friends at the garage mocked me," he said last week. "They would tell me to share with them the millions I had earned from winning the medals, but I had nothing to show for it. I had wasted my time travelling to all these places instead of concentrating on what put food on my table."
Murutu, however, seems to have hoped for too much - and thrown in the towel too easily. The junior championships, for instance, do not attract any monetary gain, and maybe had he staked it out and joined the senior team he would have landed his big break.
For instance, at the recently concluded Athletics World Championships in China, gold medal winners received a Sh6 million cash award per event.
But Murutu did not have the patience - and maybe the time - to wait for the windfall. He expected the transformation to be instant, the accolades to come with tangible benefits.
BIG BREAK
And you cannot blame him; his family looked up to him for the big break, he was at that stage in one's life when one starts putting the lego pieces together, and he was about to marry his girlfriend, Miriam Waithera Mwangi, who is now two months pregnant.
With such heavy loads resting on his shoulders, the garage seemed to be a more attractive proposition. Here he was guaranteed of at least Sh300 daily, as well as the camaraderie of his colleagues.
He still pays the Sh300 annual membership fee to train at the Kitengela Community Gym, but he does not think he will be representing Kenya in any weightlifting meeting any time soon. His priorities have changed, his focus shifted.
"I still lift weights, but not for sport," he said. "I lost hope because of the way I was treated. It was not what I had expected. Life has changed and it is now time for me to move on. I have never received my medals from Gaborone, and that's quite demoralising."
Speaking to DN2 on phone from Congo, Brazzaville, where he is leading a team of Kenya weightlifters at the ongoing All Africa Games, Kawa secretary general John Ogolla said his team had "followed up the issue" of Murutu's missing medals but Coja, the games' organising committee, had never met their end of the bargain.
Nock secretary Stephen Soi said Murutu's case was beyond Kenya's interventions as the local organising committee in Botswana had long been disbanded.
"At the moment… the position is that the organisers should have brought the medals. There is nothing we can do," he said.
Daily Nation