Flying Dutchwoman

Hilda Kibet’s wide smile lights up her face, and when she says the things one expects to hear from a visitor, like India being a nice place, you know it isn’t just the rehearsed lines she’s repeating. The European cross-country champion, in Bangalore for the World 10K, talked about hearing stories about India as a kid, about it being a favoured destination for higher studies. So when she heard of the World 10K in Bangalore, “I thought wow, India’s far away, and I’ll never be there otherwise…”

The 28-year-old Kenyan-born Dutchwoman has several prestigious wins in distance running events to her credit. She won the London 10K and the New York City Half Marathon in 2007, the European Cross-Country Championships in 2008, and came sixth at the World Cross Country in Amman this year.

These are impressive achievements for a woman who took to competitive running only in her early twenties. But then, although Hilda’s story resembles her fellow-competitors’ in many respects, there are some vital differences.

The eldest of ten siblings, and the daughter of a forest officer, she wasn’t interested in running. Life in the village of Kapchorwa in Kenya was about helping her mother with the housework. “Because of the young children, I had to help my mother. My father wanted us to go to school, so we’d go in the morning and get back home for lunch. And then we had to collect firewood and water for home…”

Although her high school teachers (she’d joined a sports school) encouraged her to take up running, Hilda, unlike many of her peers, was unwilling to give up her focus on studies. Having completed high school, she approached her cousin, the accomplished runner Lornah Kiplagat, who arranged for her move to Holland, where she enrolled for a course in physiotherapy. Hilda’s competitive career started only when she was about 22, and that seems to weigh on her mind each time she competes. Running a marathon in Amsterdam in 2007, for example, she was exhausted at 35K, but “the only thought I had was that I flew all the way from Kenya to Amsterdam, so I just had to continue running. Later I showed the video to my father and he cried. It was so painful.”

Kenyan runners, and many of their African counterparts, have been unmatched in distance running. “It’s mainly for a living. You don’t see people running for fun,” says Hilda.