Kiprop Team Is Uganda’s Best

Mar 22, 2004

BONIFACE Kiprop might have failed to strike gold in Brussels at the weekend, but his team’s performance will nevertheless go down as Uganda’s best in the World Cross-country.

By James Bakama

BONIFACE Kiprop might have failed to strike gold in Brussels at the weekend, but his team’s performance will nevertheless go down as Uganda’s best in the World Cross-country.
Uganda’s new record came in form of the country having two finishers in the top ten. It’s a feat that came via Kiprop’s silver, his second in the annual competition, and Moses Aliwa’s eighth position in the junior men’s race.
Records stretched to the team’s best third and fourth place finishes ever by Herbert Okuti and Nicholas Kwemo in 11 and 12 position respectively.
That the top 12 positions were restricted to runners from Ethiopia, Kenya and Uganda, also said a lot about Uganda’s rating in distance running. Among the nations that have steadily fallen in Uganda’s wake since the country’s 1998 return from a 23-year absence from annual competition, are giants like Morocco, Algeria and Japan.
But while Kiprop can now confidently look back at his days as a junior and claim to have been a key factor in Uganda’s four consecutive team bronze medals, it is also time he re-examined his tactics.
Kiprop has in his two individual medal-winning performances always been beaten in a final sprint. Eight-kilometer junior men winner Tadesse Meba must have been a keen student of Eliud Kipchoge Lausanne victory over Kiprop in 2003.
Tadesse, seventh in Lausanne, strategically like Kipchoge last year kept at the heels of the front pack in Brussels where Kiprop was always the aggressor.
Tadesse only came to the front in the final kilometer. He then patiently waited for the last meters to speed away well knowing that at that stage of the race the Ugandan could not cope with a sprint.
That Kiprop seems to have hit a plateau in the last year, raises question marks on the capability of his coach and Kim Sports management, who manage his competition.
Dorcus Inzikuru, tenth in juniors in 2000, could this time only finish 38th . This was a serious warning of the need to start grooming other female long distance runners. Ends

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