Running into love: The romance and tragedy of athlete marriages

Wesley Korir, 2012 Boston Marathon Champion and Member of Parliament for Cherangany with his wife Tarah Korir. (Courtesy)

Many organisations have put a caveat against dating or marrying colleagues. The advice is always that if it happens then one person has to resign.

However, when people spend a lot of time together, romantic love has a way of filtering through the spaces. Elite-level athletes lead disciplined lives where their lives revolve around training and running. Many of them have fallen in love, I mean run into love with their colleagues in the training camps and warming tracks. Love has made many athletes change their citizenship. 

Our bodies secrete four “feel good” hormones like dopamine, serotonin, endorphins, and oxytocin. Endorphins are secreted during physical exercise and help prevent muscles from feeling pain. It minimises our perception of pain thus raising endurance levels. Endorphin lowers stress levels which gives an athlete a positive outlook on life. The post-running feeling is always one of a relaxed and calm spirit. This is brought by endocannabinoids — substances produced naturally by the body and similar to cannabis.

Exercise raises the levels of endocannabinoids in the blood. Unlike endorphins, they are mood-improving neuromodulators and promote short-term psychoactive effects such as reduced anxiety and feelings of calm. If athletes hang around each other, especially in the periods between robust physical exercises, then they are bound to fall in love with each other. You can imagine the pickup line; “Wow, you look like Diamond League Jackpot”. The lady then responds, “You must run your best race to win me.”

The overriding advantage is that they offer social support to each other because they understand the rigorous nature of athletics and the disciplined lifestyle it requires. This has made many athletes fall in love and even get married. The big-money awards for appearances and wins also attract greedy people who prey on the athletes. The money has also led to breakups of athletes’ marriages. Eldoret and Kapsabet courts have been playgrounds for custody and property battles.

Kenya’s Ronald Kwemoi won a silver medalist in the 5,000 metres at the concluded Olympics. Meanwhile Ugandan Stella Chesang’ came in eighth in the Marathon as Kenya’s Hellen Obiri bagged bronze. Kwemoi and Chesang’ got married in 2018. They met at the 2016 Olympics in Rio, Brazil. The two hail from the slopes of Mt Elgon but are divided by an international boundary.

Lonah Chemtai Salpeter won a bronze medal in Marathon at the 2022 World Championships in Oregon, USA. In 2009, she left Kenya to be a nanny for the Kenyan ambassador to Israel. That is where she met Dan Salpeter, a former Israeli middle-distance runner who became her coach. They got married in 2016.

Wesley Korir, a Kenyan long distance athlete who once served as Cherengany MP, got married to Canadian Tarah McKay, who is also an athlete, in 2010. His wife Tarah also won the Canadian Junior Cross Country Championship in 2003 and represented Canada three times.

Columbian Marianna Pajon won her second Olympic BMX cycling race at the 2016 Olympics in Brazil. Pajon began racing early but featured in her first Olympics at the 2012 London Olympics. Frenchman Vincent Pelluard won his national championship in 2013. A few months later he met Pajon and they began to date. They married in 2017 and by 2019, Pelluard had switched to race for Columbia.

All is not always well in the athletics paradise. Agnes Tirop had returned from a race in Switzerland in October 2021 when her brother discovered her lifeless body in her house in Iten. Six months later, Damaris Mutua was also found dead in Iten. She had clinched a bronze medal at the 2010 Youth Olympics in Singapore.

Police declared that Tirop’s husband Ibrahim Rotich was the main suspect in her murder. The case is ongoing in an Eldoret court. Damaris, who had become a Bahrain citizen, was allegedly murdered by her Ethiopian boyfriend. The man was also an athlete who was training in the high-altitude camps in Iten.