There are dozens of Kenyan athletes around the world. Not all of them are famous, like those participating in the World Championships in Tokyo, where Kenya has already won four gold medals.
There are also those who are amateurs in their home country but have results that are still significant in many Western countries.
So they are recruited by often unscrupulous agents and managers who promise them good earnings and, acting in their own interests, partly keep them. Especially if the “horses” they have bet on win.
But in Russia, it's a little different. Here, being ‘recruited’ for a race can also have another purpose, and very risky implications.
This is what happened to a middle-distance athlete named Evans, who found himself on the border with Ukraine, where the only sports are killing and defending, not middle-distance races.
Yes, you heard right: he arrived in Moscow on a tourist visa and was captured wearing a Russian uniform, he who until two weeks earlier had been running the 1500 meters and not being chased by tanks.
The story sounds like a joke, except that behind it are the usual signatures on incomprehensible papers and a passport that has vanished into thin air. Evans says: “I went to Russia as a tourist, to run. Then my contact told me he could extend my visa. I signed some documents in Cyrillic, without knowing I was enlisting.” And here he is, in Kharkiv, in camouflage instead of a tank top, as the Kenyan himself recounts on the Star newspaper website.
The script is one we've seen before: fight or die. So, in seven days, the middle-distance runner found himself catapulted to the front line, surrounded by other foreigners with the same lost look in their eyes. He had never held a rifle before and certainly didn't want to start there. When he realized that the only alternative was to become fertilizer, he chose to flee: two days in the forest, fasting and without a compass, to surrender to the Ukrainians with his hands up.
“The Russians would have killed me. The Ukrainians, on the other hand, gave me water and bread. They are good people,” he says today. And while Moscow has probably already marked him as missing, he thinks only of a 16-year-old girl, his daughter, who is waiting for him at home with her grandmother.
A runner who no longer runs. A tourist who will never return to take photos in Red Square. A father clinging to the hope of coming out alive from a war that is not his.
Meanwhile, rumors are coming from many quarters: Africans deceived with the promise of a job and finding themselves on the front line. The Kremlin, of course, denies it. But Evans' tired face already tells the whole story.