The Unnamed Cadence: Decoding the Performances of East African Women in Track and Field

On the scoreboard at Kasarani Stadium in Nairobi, a number flickered up and then froze. Nobody in the press row cheered. A young woman had just crossed the line in the 200 metres, but every eye turned instead to the small wind gauge at the corner of the track — the tiny device that holds the fate of an entire race. The wind read plus 2.4 metres per second. The number that had just appeared on the board fell out of reach of a record and became a footnote.

I have sat in that row more times than I can count. Each time, I ask myself the same question: what makes one performance count, and another one forgotten? And why, in the answer to that question, do East African women almost always end up on the forgotten side?

At sixty-one, after forty-five years behind a pen, I have learned that sport never grows old; only our way of looking at it wears thin. A race may have happened long ago, but how we read it changes every year. And how we have read East African women's performances, for decades, has been a reading so careless it was almost deliberate.

Context: when data is not recorded, people disappear too

East African athletics is a paradox. Kenya and Ethiopia dominate world distance running, yet most of what they do does not exist in any proper record. County meets, provincial meets, internal selection races in Iten or Nyahururu take place before sparse crowds, with hand-held stopwatches and hastily written reports. When a twenty-year-old woman runs a time that should make people gasp, that time often vanishes from every official database before anyone bothers to write it down properly.

With men, the attention is thicker. Strong men's times are still chased and logged on the spot by managers, brands and scouts, because people believe there is money there. With women, people believe there is only patience — and patience, apparently, does not need recording.

I once believed that was simply how things were. Until 2026, when I sat alone with a scattered pile of national women's league data and found something the naked eye could not see. A nineteen-year-old midfielder, Mercy Achieng, had an eighty-seven per cent passing accuracy, the highest in the league, yet had never been called up. I wrote about her. Male colleagues mocked the piece. Three months later she was called up and scored on debut. A Swedish club took her to Europe for what was reported as the highest fee ever paid for Kenyan women's football.

The girl with the old shoes never appeared in any report, but I saw her in every number. From then on, I understood that in track and field it is the same: a forgotten performance is not a weak performance. It is just one nobody has bothered to read properly.

That is why I built myself a serious method of reading, layer by layer, so I would never repeat the old mistake. I call it reading a race from the inside out, and what follows is what I have found over the years.

The first layer: the number on the board is not the performance

The first thing a reader must do, before praising or criticising, is check whether the number is valid. A time exists only inside a web of conditions, and if we ignore that web, we are reading half the truth.

In sprints and jumps, wind is the key variable. World Athletics recognises a record only when the assisting wind does not exceed two metres per second. Above that threshold, a performance still counts in competition but no longer counts in history. A woman running a 100 metres into a gusting wind is still the winner of that day, but she is not the fastest in history, however loudly the board may claim otherwise.

In distance races the variable changes. Altitude leads. A track at around two thousand metres, like Nairobi or Eldoret, reduces air resistance and gives clear gains to events under a few minutes, sometimes one to two per cent. Conversely, marathon and half-marathon suffer badly when altitude is high. The same athlete, the same body, read on two different kinds of course, produces two different stories.

There is a third variable few notice: split data. An aggregate time says nothing about how it was built. A late kick over the final two hundred metres is not the same as even pacing from gun to tape. Same result, yet one athlete shows boundless potential and the other shows defined limits. If East African meets logged women's splits as diligently as they log men's, we would see an entirely different map of talent in this region.

When numbers learn to speak a name, the whole field must listen. But before a number can speak a name, it must be recorded honestly to the tenth of a second.

The second layer: a body has a curve, not a dot

Another common mistake is to read an athlete from a single race. Technical data shows that a person's progress is not isolated dots but a curve. For women, the curve often peaks later than men's in distance events, usually somewhere between twenty-four and twenty-nine for the very top of a career, though personal bests can come later still.

This means a nineteen-year-old running slower than a twenty-five-year-old is not necessarily weaker. She is at a different point on the curve, not at a different level. And a thirty-two-year-old still improving her personal best is not necessarily finished. She may be exactly on schedule for a long career.

Season's best is a more important health signal than personal best. A personal best set three years ago says nothing about whether she can run fast today. A season's best creeping toward a career best, though it has not yet surpassed it, is a very strong signal of an athlete peaking at the right time.

In East Africa, where women are often pushed into punishing competition cycles to earn money for their families, the idea of peaking is routinely traded for the idea of racing a lot. The result is peaks eroded before they are reached. A wise reader looks at the schedule, the races run this month, the trips between continents — things not on the scoreboard that nonetheless decide what the scoreboard shows.

The third layer: entry to major championships is not only about running fast

A common misunderstanding among fans is that a good enough time automatically earns a place at a major meet. In reality the road is more complex. Some championships grant places by qualifying standard. Others rely on world ranking points accumulated across a season. Some use both.

In East Africa this becomes especially harsh for women. A woman wanting ranking points must travel widely, must have a manager with the right connections, must have money for flights. Together, these conditions create a silent filter where talent alone is not enough. That is why some of the brightest talents on Kenyan women's tracks can sit outside major meets not because they are slow, but because they lack the structure to take the right road.

When I look at a national team list, I scan not only the names chosen but the names left out. An absence is also a kind of data, sometimes the loudest kind.

The fourth layer: the event map and the East African woman's place

When people speak of East Africa they tend to lump it into one block. But a careful reading of the event map shows Kenya strongest from 1,500 to 10,000 metres, while Ethiopia spreads across the whole distance range with astonishing depth. Both lean on a youth development system in camps along the Rift Valley, where girls run together on dusty roads from six in the morning.

In sprints and technical events, the gap between East Africa and the rest of the world remains wide. But this is not a gap in biological ability. It is largely a gap in investment, facilities and coaching education. A female jumper born where there is a track and a specialist coach would reach a different height entirely.

In that picture, East African women are often mentioned as symbols of endurance but rarely trained as technical athletes. A whole generation runs on instinct and faith, and does it very well. But to go further, they need what instinct cannot replace.

The sporting world always wants a ranking. I only want to understand why they run, why they cry. A ranking can teach us who is leading, but not why someone is left behind.

The fifth layer: the rules and the grey zone of fairness

Since world athletics' integrity body was established with testing, biological passports and whereabouts reporting, the anti-doping landscape has changed fundamentally. For East African athletes this cuts both ways. On one hand it cleans the field. On the other it places obligations on personal budgets that many cannot carry.

For women the burden is heavier. They often lack a professional agent to keep them updated, get little procedural training, and slip easily into administrative violations — not from cheating, but from not knowing which form to update. One paperwork slip can erase a whole career.

There is also the question of competition conditions. Equipment, shoes, track surface, wind gauges — any of these can become a source of dispute. A meet with a faltering wind system can invalidate a whole day for female athletes simply because the organisers lacked resources. A wise reader must distinguish between what is called cheating and what is really happening, which is often just the failure of infrastructure.

The sixth layer: the training system behind a number

No number is born from nothing. Every performance is the product of a system: a coach, a training group, recovery conditions, diet, a quiet place to sleep, a body rested at the right moment.

In the camps at Iten, women's groups train together under veteran coaches. They share cadence, share pain, share dreams. But they often lack recovery tools and sports medicine that athletes in richer countries take for granted.

What is striking is that most of their strength comes from a collective system rather than individual genius. A Kenyan athlete may have no private coach, but she has a group of friends ready to run fifteen kilometres with her before dawn. That is a system, even without a laboratory or machines.

When I read a performance, I always ask: who was there exactly thirty minutes before she ran? And who will be there thirty minutes after she finishes, when every camera has gone? The answers to those two questions matter, to me, no less than the scoreboard.

The seventh layer: risks that never show on screen

East African women athletes face a distinctive risk map. Competition is brutal. Financial pressure weighs heavily, since many are the economic pillars of their families. Injury can strike without warning. Then there are risks off the track, from unplanned pregnancy to a lack of contractual protection.

These risks are rarely written down, yet they shape every stride. An athlete treated by male colleagues and by the system as a cheap opportunity will accept deals a male athlete would never sign.

When I look at their schedules, I see not just races but a chain of endless debt: flights, accommodation, fees to a local manager. Each trip may bring in a little money or push them deeper into a spiral. Not every athlete gets to choose where she stops.

The eighth layer: the story the public wants, and the truth beneath the mist

Every athlete who steps into the light is fitted with a story. The most common label for East African women is the model of endurance, humility and suffering. Once people have grown fond of that story, they find it hard to see anything else.

If a girl runs well, people call it God-given instinct and praise it. If she declines, they call it a lack of hunger. Both are tidy ways to avoid the complicated truth. Behind a result there may be an undiagnosed injury, a disrupted training season for lack of food, a family needing her home earlier than expected.

The question I always ask of a rising phenomenon: does the public's expectation match the data behind it? A feat on a windy afternoon, a beautiful morning at altitude, a meet missing strong rivals — all can produce glittering effects that fade quickly. But a careful writer must restrain the urge to turn everything into a symbol.

The ninth layer: from the track to the small economy behind it

Athletics is not just running. It is a value chain linking children in a village to international meets, through sports companies, broadcasters, managers, physiotherapists, shoe makers and advertising campaigns.

For East African women this chain was once pinched at both ends: the runners and the companies. In the middle, where the real opportunities and revenues are generated, they were largely absent. A woman athlete could become the face of a brand but rarely the director or owner of a club or a label.

That is why the value of a wave of women athletes cannot be measured only in medals. It is measured by how many of them take roles within the structure, from coach to team manager to organiser. When women not only run but decide how running is done, only then is there lasting change.

The counter-intuitive angle: market value is not competitive value

This is where I want to pause, because it is the most easily missed point. We tend to judge an athlete by her market value: sponsorship money, media mentions, followers. But competitive value is different. It lies in the ability to win big races, in durability across years, in the psychology of standing at the start line. The two values do not always overlap.

I have seen women run extraordinarily fast, win important races, with not a single article written about them. And I have seen others with a full advertising campaign who never won a significant title. Meanwhile fans read most easily about the person the media has pushed, not the person who is genuinely strongest.

When numbers learn to speak a name, the whole field must listen. But the market often does not want to listen. The market wants a story that is easy to tell, easy to sell, easy to spread. And East African women, for most of recent history, have been given no story at all to sell.

Another counter-intuitive point concerns praise. People love to talk about resilience as a mental quality. I would argue it is more accurately a physical and infrastructural problem. An athlete does not endure because she is exceptionally patient. She endures because she has no better option. The beauty the public sees is sometimes only a burden, repackaged.

2026 taught me that the truest star is not the fastest runner but the one holding herself together in silence. When the pandemic froze world sport, I called women's coaches across East Africa. Many players had to return to farming after losing their income. Linet Atieno, a twenty-two-year-old who once scored many goals in the national league, trained alone with a ball made from scraps of cloth. I wrote a series about them, with figures on the share of women athletes leaving the game, nearly two thirds. The series pushed the federation to release a support budget.

The truth is that in sport what is rewarded most is not endurance but the ability to see opportunity before others do. And East African women are beginning to learn how to see. A new generation is growing up with smartphones, with social media, with an understanding of their own worth. They no longer accept murky contracts or sign papers they do not understand. That is changing the power structure in places that once seemed immovable.

What is changing

Back at Kasarani that afternoon. The woman running the 200 metres with the wind above the threshold did not get a record. But she had something more precious: a coach sitting and logging every tenth of a second, a group of friends analysing the race on the bus home, and a local paper publishing the split data — the first time in years a women's race at provincial level was logged so thoroughly. The number created no record. But it created a name that was remembered.

At sixty-one, I have learned that sport never grows old; only our way of looking at it wears thin. One day, when the data tables in East African running camps are full of women's names, I hope people still remember these first hasty notes. Because a revolution does not begin with a medal. It begins when someone sits down and counts all the way through.