The Vault

To Run In Kenya, To Run In The World

The Mercurial Life and Mysterious Death of Sammy Wanjiru

by DAVID EPSTEIN
Originally Posted: April 16, 2012
For millions of years the region around Kenya's Rift Valley has been the site of mass migrations,
but they usually involve zebras, gazelles, wildebeests and the predators that track them. So
residents of Nyahururu won't soon forget the morning of May 16, 2011, when their agricultural
town began to swell with people. They flowed in by the thousands, packed into cars or clinging
to the sides of crammed minibuses known as matatus. In the best of times traveling the valley's
rutted roads is slow and perilous, but that day, with donkey carts and automobiles pressed as
tightly as Tetris pieces, the streets were choked to a standstill. All of those people were coming
to see if it was true: Could Sammy Wanjiru really be dead?
And how could you blame them? Wanjiru had brought home the last talisman of distance
running that Kenya lackedan Olympic gold medal in the marathonand after the 2008
Games the people of Nyahururu had taken him into the town's stadium on top of a truck to
rejoice in his superhuman strength.
The pundits at the Beijing Olympics said that the marathon would be slow. The temperatures
exceeded 80. And it was slowfor everyone except Wanjiru. "The athletes in Beijing will be
strong with five kilometers left," Wanjiru told one of his coaches, Francis Kamau, before he left
for China. "The only way to kill them will be to kill them from the gun. Then when they try to
come, they will never come."
That was exactly how he ran the greatest marathon in history. In the sweltering humidity he took
off at world-record pace, stringing out the field from the start. The pace was still breakneck when
Wanjiru surged at the 10-mile mark. Just four runners hung on, and he tormented them. He
glanced at his watch, he later told his countryman Peter Kirui, to unsettle his competitors. When
rivals tried to draft behind Wanjiru, he swerved. By the time he entered the Bird's Nest stadium,
he had been alone for 15 minutes. He sprinted to the line even though there was no one close,
and he finished in 2:06:32, shattering the Olympic record by nearly three minutes.
Less than three years later, sometime after 11 p.m. on May 15, 2011, Wanjiru was found lying
on his back on the pavement below a balcony at his walled-in compound, blood oozing from the
back of his head. By midnight he was dead. The police hastily issued a statement declaring
Wanjiru's death a suicide. They said he had jumped to his death after his wife caught him at
home with another woman.
At its highest point, the balcony is 14 feet from the pavement. No one believed the police
statement.
Carving a life out of the semi-arid savanna of central Kenya has never been simplenot even
for boys who, unlike Sammy Wanjiru, grew up in a household with a father.

In the 1950s, Nyahururu, which sits almost exactly on the equator, nearly 8,000 feet above the
Rift Valley floor, was a center of rebellion against British colonial authorities. The region was so
dangerous that a LIFE magazine writer described it as a place where "you put the pistol in the
soap tray when you take a bath." After Kenya achieved independence in 1963, though, this area
of farmland crossed by a tangle of disintegrating roads became relatively peaceful. Since 1990,
Nyahururu has doubled in size as farmers flocked there to take over cheap land for crop and
flower production with access to burgeoning industries in town such as the Kenya Cooperative
Creameries. Yet the city of 30,000 is not so tame that the occasional resident isn't still killed by a
hippo or a lion.
Wanjiru grew up outside Nyahururu and did not put on a shoe until he was 14. He ran or walked
barefoot over dirt and rocks to get to school or to the grocery store. When water was needed for
cooking, he had to trek to the Kwandugiri River.
For a few years after Sammy was born, his mother, Hannah, gardened and sold porridge for
money. But she couldn't earn enough, so she left Sammy and his younger brother, Simon, with
their grandparents and disappeared for months at a time to earn more.
Most years Sammy's relatives scraped together enough money for his school fees. He was a
quiet boyhe could spend hours playing with a toy car fashioned from metal wirebut he made
friends in school through running. By fourth grade he was entering cross-country races. He
would ask his relatives to pray for him, and he believed it worked because he kept winning. He
won the 3,000 meters at the district championships on the gravel track in the Nyahururu
stadium. But the last of the money dried up, and Sammy never finished middle school.
Thanks to a connection between a local coach and a Japanese scout, though, the Nyahururu
area had become a pipeline for runners of the Kikuyu ethnicity, which Sammy was, to get
scholarships to Japanese high schools and help the schools compete in hugely popular
Japanese road relay races called ekiden. When a coach asked Sammy if he was interested in
attending school in Japan, he answered that he had no idea where Japan was but that he was
ready to go. And so, in 2002, he skipped straight to Sendai Ikuei Gakuen High School, in
northeastern Japan. He helped the school set an ekiden record, and he would repeat, over and
over, the Japanese word gaman, which roughly translates as patient perseverance.
After Wanjiru graduated in March '05, he stayed in Japan to race ekiden for Toyota Kyushu's
corporate team, and immediately began a pattern that would last the rest of his life: parting with
money as quickly as he earned it. He wanted his mother home when he went to visit, so he sent
part of his first paycheck to Hannah, who says through a translator that she used it to buy a plot
of land for her mother.
By all accounts Wanjiru was beloved among his teammates for his humility, and he led a stable
life in team housing. But Kenyans who have run for corporate teams in Japan say that they
never felt entirely integrated into Japanese society, and most return home. "Because of the
different culture," says Johnson Muiruri, a runner who trained with Wanjiru in Japan and became
his close friend, "[a Kenyan man] cannot get a girlfriend there unless maybe you stay 20 years."
It was on a trip home in the summer of '05 that Wanjiru met Terezah Njeri. In Kenya a woman
who lives with a man or bears his child may be considered his wife. By that standard Njeri
became Wanjiru's wife in September '05, when she moved into a house he had paid for. It was
the same month that he first broke the world half-marathon record, for which he reportedly
earned $100,000.

Hannah Wanjiru and Njeri disliked each other from the start. Over the next two years Sammy
built the two women spacious houses inside fortress-like compounds within 150 yards of each
other on a dirt road in Nyahururu. But each woman looked askance at anything Sammy bought
the other. Each felt that the other wanted to control his money. According to Sammy's friends,
relatives and business associates, they were both right.
None of Sammy's expenditures went unscrutinized by his wife or his mother. Not the $25,000 he
donated to a children's home in Nyahururu after he broke the world half-marathon record for the
third time, in March '07. Not the beauty parlor he financed for Njeri, which went bust. According
to Wanjiru's coaches, his mother would even complain when he was home and they used his
cars to get him and his training partners to and from workouts. When Wanjiru was in Japan, he
often called his uncle John Kamau and asked him to mediate disputes between his mother and
wife. "The differences were all about money," Kamau says. "It was not about anything else."
In early 2008, Wanjiru returned home from Japan to stay. Later that year, after his dramatic
Olympic victory, he began commanding high appearance fees whenever he ran. The money
deepened the rift between his mother and his wife. All the while, Wanjiru was busily spending it
or giving it away. He enjoyed the trappings of wealth. He commissioned a local artist to paint a
giant, gaudy wildlife mural on one of the walls surrounding his house. And the boy who could
lose hours playing with a toy car made from scrap was now a man who paid cash for a fleet of
Toyota's bestLand Cruiser, Mark X, RAV4that depreciated rapidly on the crater-pocked
Kenyan roads.
He also never refused people who needed money. After a workout Wanjiru would buy 25
runners lunch, and he paid for a Nissan for use by athletes who had no other way to travel to
races. One runner named Ken Kasmili says Wanjiru began paying his son's school fees so that
Kasmili could work fewer hours and focus on training.
Wanjiru was an economy unto himself. And almost everything he boughtcars, land, houses
was wildly overpriced. When he was in Nyahururu he frequented the pubs. His friends point out
almost every large bar in town as "one of his favorite places," and locals would text one another
when they spotted him out drinking, sending the alert that it was a good time to sell. Suddenly
Wanjiru, at the bar, would be buying $900 plots of land for $3,000.
He did, though, make some fruitful purchases. With the help of James Mwangi, a local
veterinarian who became a close friend, Wanjiru purchased a plot of land and built a dairy farm
that in its prime sustained 15 cows and produced 55 gallons of milk a day. But the runner never
liked to haggle with people over money, and he did not bargain at all when he was drunk. For
the Bird Nest Flats apartment complex he was building in the more prosperous city of Nakuru,
"he probably spent 10 times the cost," says Ndegwa Wahome, the lawyer who handled the
paperwork for Wanjiru's transactions. "Some of the people working there took so much of the
materials that they built their own houses."
In front of the compound where Wanjiru was found fatally injured there is still a patch of dead
grass. It's where people pitched tents or put down blankets so they could bombard him with
business opportunities whenever he came or went.
The tale of the inner-city basketball player climbing from public housing to public figure is
familiar to those who follow U.S. sports. Along the altitudinous ledges of the Rift Valley, a similar
narrative increasingly plays out among marathon runners, but on a scale even more dizzying

and dangerous. "You [Americans] run for glory," says Harun Ngatia, a physiotherapist who
works with top runners and treated Wanjiru. "Here the financial interest comes first."
As the monetary rewards of running have increasingly migrated from track events to marathons
on streets in Europe and the U.S., Kenyans have followed in astonishing numbers. A single
podium finish at a major marathon can earn life-altering money for a rural Kenyan. In
Nyahururu, the major shopping mall is the Olympia Centre, which borrows the name of a
skyscraper in Chicago and is owned by Daniel Njenga, whose money comes from second- and
third-place finishes in that city's marathon.
The result of this concentration of prize money in the marathon has been a dominance
unparalleled in modern international sports. Though a power in distance running since the
1960s, Kenyan men have made the marathon their own since Wanjiru's bold example in Beijing.
It's the kind of supremacy that usually exists when just one country truly values a sport: Japan in
sumo, Canada in curling. Between April and November 2011, Kenyan men broke course
records in the five most prominent marathonsBerlin, Boston, Chicago, London and New York
Cityby a collective sum of six minutes and 22 seconds. It's hard to come up with any measure
sufficient to characterize the strength of the Kenyan marathon army, but try this: Sixteen
American men in history have run faster than 2:10 (a 4:58 per mile pace); 38 Kenyan men did it
in October.
As many superstar marathoners as Kenya produces, relatively few of them are members of the
Kikuyu tribe. Outside of Kenya people debate whether Kenyan distance runners have a
biological advantage over runners from other countries. Inside Kenya the debate is whether the
Kalenjin people have an advantage over the Kikuyu.
The Kalenjin, whose ancestors are from Sudan and who are known for their long limbs and
extremely slender build, make up only 12% of Kenya's population but the vast majority of its top
runners. Meanwhile the Kikuyu, who tend to be smaller and a bit stockier, compose 22% of the
population but contribute far fewer elite athletes. (Several Kalenjin men have claimed to be
Wanjiru's father, arguing that with his speed he could only be Kalenjin. Wanjiru's relatives say
they are not sure who his father is.) Nyahururu is the major training base for Kikuyu runners.
At 10 a.m. on a typical Tuesday, the gray gravel track in the center of town is thronged. Nearly
100 runners are doing interval sessions. Some of them are unknowns with little experience who
show up and try to run stride for stride with athletes such as Charles Kamathi, the 2001 world
champion in the 10,000 meters. Even now, some of the runners wear Nikes that Wanjiru
acquired through his sponsorship deal and gave to them brand new. Others are dressed in the
national gear of athlete-poor but cash-rich countries such as Bahrain, which gives Kenyan
runners quick citizenship and a salary in return for results.
According to Kenyan coaches, the Kalenjin communities have had more role models than the
less experienced Kikuyu in terms of managing sudden and staggering wealth. Not that it comes
easily to anyone. Since sports agents were allowed into Kenya in the '90s, athletes have often
learned their business lessons painfully.
Tom Ratcliffe, a Boston-based longtime agent for Kenyan athletes, can rattle off the runners
who have made a little money and quickly fallen prey to bad business deals. One of his former
clients, Timothy Cherigat, won the Boston Marathon in 2004 and the next year stopped training
rigorously and invested in developing a gas station. "It turned out the person he bought the land
from didn't own it," says Ratcliffe, who would advise athletes to keep money in treasury bonds

until they were done competing. "He lost it, and it got caught up in the courts. He gave his
career for that gas station."
Many of the top Kalenjin athletes now move to Nairobi, where their wealth stands out less. John
Ngugi, the greatest Kikuyu runner of allgold medalist in the 1988 Olympic 5,000 meters and a
five-time world cross-country championthinks the Kikuyu should follow suit. "If somebody
comes with a new car in Nyahururu," Ngugi says, "the whole town knows." Ngugi estimates that
he earned $300,000 in his running career. He used it to build a house and a grocery store near
Nyahururu that were robbed four times in two years.
Consider that a typical Nyahururu household, one that owns a few head of cattle and grows
maize or potatoes, might make $1,000 in a year. And consider that Wanjiru earned up to $10
million, according to his lawyer, not only in prize money but also from endorsements with Nike
and a Japanese dietary supplement line. In relative terms there might never have been a more
dramatic rags-to-riches ascent in sports than Sammy Wanjiru's.
There were multiple robbery attempts on Wanjiru's house in Nyahururu. Francis Kamau says
that armed thieves once stopped Wanjiru's car and held him until the police came and killed one
of the assailants. Ibrahim Kinuthia, a former international runner and coach who worked with
Wanjiru, says that some people thought Wanjiru's Olympic medal was made of solid gold.
"Nyahururu is good for training," Ngugi says, "but not good for staying."
In 2009, Wanjiru set course records in both the London (2:05:10) and Chicago (2:05:41)
marathons. He also started dating Mary Wacera, a runner he met at the Nyahururu track.
They could talk to each other about Beijing, where Wacera won bronze in the 5,000 meters at
the '06 world junior championships. She and Wanjiru started going to and from training together,
and he didn't mind occasionally slowing the pace of a recovery run so they could run together
and talk.
As a promising athlete, Wacera never felt the need to ask Wanjiru for money, which endeared
her to Wanjiru's mother. Wacera also did not complain about Wanjiru's late nights out, which his
friends say often included other women.
In December 2009, Wacera and Wanjiru were married. There was an actual ceremony, which
Wanjiru had not had with Terezah Njeri, who by that time had borne Wanjiru two children.
(Having more than one wife is traditional in Kenya, albeit increasingly rare.) "I had no problem
with [Njeri]," Wacera says, "but she hated me so much." (Njeri has talked to media outlets but
did not answer repeated calls from SI.) Wanjiru rented a house for Wacera right between the
homes of his mother and Njeri, on that same dirt road.
But his money supply soon began to dwindle. Mwangi, the veterinarian, was with Wanjiru once
when Njeri showed up and dressed down her husband in front of his friends for not giving her
more money for the children. "How can I live like this?" Mwangi recalls Wanjiru saying.
To allay Njeri's complaints, Wanjiru had Mwangi help her open a pharmacy in the center of
Nyahururu. The royal blue metal doors of Njewan Chemist opened for business in March 2010.
But, Mwangi says, Njeri failed to replenish the drugs, and the doors closed by December.
Even when he escaped the bickering women, Wanjiru could not find solitude. Ngatia, his
physiotherapist, recalls that by 2010 the runner was never alone, even during treatment
sessions. "There were always cousins or friends around," Ngatia says, people who lived off
Wanjiru. His benders expanded to include the daytime. He would push tables together at the
Jimrock club in town and lose himself in the Kikuyu pop music. He was once so swarmed at a

bar that Kinuthia tried to swat people away by telling them that Sammy was no longer buying.
But Sammy was always buying. In one stupor he bought a Range Rover from a fair-weather
friend for $145,000, nearly a 100% markup.
Wanjiru's Italy-based manager, Federico Rosa, heard that the runner was self-destructing in
Nyahururu. At the London Marathon in April 2010 Wanjiru was barely past the halfway mark
when he dropped out. On the way back to Kenya, Rosa and Claudio Berardelli, a 31-year-old
Italian coach who lives in Kenya and trains some of Rosa's athletes, took Wanjiru to Italy to give
him a liver toxicity test. It showed that Wanjiru had not yet done permanent damage with his
drinking. "But I told Federico to scare him," Berardelli says. "Tell him that there were some
signs, but that if he stops [drinking] now things will be O.K. Otherwise he's on the way to losing
his career."
In July, Berardelli invited Wanjiru to a training camp in Italy. "He was probably [10 pounds]
overweight," the coach says, "and he could not stay with the guys for a 50-minute run." After the
camp Berardelli, who lives in Eldoret, 80 miles northwest of Nyahururu, found a place for
Wanjiru to stay near him.
In August, with two months to go before he was to defend his Chicago Marathon title, and still in
awful shape, Wanjiru switched his training base to Eldoret. He stopped drinking cold turkey, but
he was getting dusted by other runners in training. Two weeks before Chicago, Berardelli called
Rosa to say that Wanjiru probably would not be able to finish the marathon and that they should
withdraw him. But Wanjiru pleaded, " 'Let me try, let me try, let me try,'" Berardelli says.
If there ever has been a marathon performance more stunning than Wanjiru's in Beijing, it was
Wanjiru's in Chicago in October 2010. Not in top shape and two months removed from daily
binge drinking, he was repeatedly dropped by Ethiopia's Tsegaye Kebede whenever he
challenged for the lead. But Wanjiru kept coming. He and Kebede traded the lead five times in
the final mile. Wanjiru appeared to settle for second when he started looking behind him to see
who was coming. But with a quarter mile to go he sprinted past Kebede, prompting the TV race
announcer to blurt, "What balls this guy's got!" He won by 19 seconds.
"Sammy was still going to make money, so why die to win this race?" Berardelli asks. "He had
the mentality that you think only of being the first in crossing the line, because you want to say, 'I
am the one.' You want to raise up your hands."
Following the Chicago Marathon, Wanjiru returned to Nyahururu. He never raced again.
Back home Wanjiru drank constantly and was always tiredhe would doze in the middle of
conversations. "He said, 'I want to forget my problems,'" Wacera recalls. "I said, 'They'll still be
there when you wake up.'"
On Dec. 29, 2010, Wanjiru was arrested at his house and charged with threatening to kill Njeri
during an argument and hitting his security guard with the butt of an AK-47 that he had obtained
illegally. Six weeks later, on Valentine's Day 2011, Wanjiru and Njeri had a bizarre romantic
reconciliation in front of television cameras, and she asked prosecutors to drop the assault
charges. Wanjiru's friends and relatives say Njeri's conditions for dropping the charges were that
he sign an affidavit saying she was his official wife and that he leave Wacera. Wanjiru told
Wacera that he'd rather go to jail than leave her, but he signed the affidavit, and a copy of Njeri's
national identity card issued shortly thereafter shows that his name was added to hers. Wanjiru
also moved Njeri to Ngong, a suburb of Nairobi, far from his mother and his other wife. But the
charge of illegal gun possession remained, and Wanjiru continued to drink.

Daniel Gatheru, Wanjiru's close friend and training partner, pleaded with Berardelli and Rosa to
save Wanjiru from Nyahururu. So Rosa flew in from Italy, and on May 5 he, Berardelli, Francis
Kamau, Gatheru and a few others staged an intervention with Wanjiru. They decided he would
move in with Berardelli in Eldoret until the gun case was resolved and then leave to train in
Oregon with the hope of running the New York City Marathon.
Wanjiru was relieved. He said he would change. He and the others went out to eat together at a
resort beside Nyahururu's majestic 243-foot Thomson's Falls. Kamau calls it "the Last Supper."
Everyone who knew Sammy Wanjiru understands that he was killed by his own gun. It took his
life without ever firing a bullet. If not for the gun charge, he would never have been in Nyahururu
on the night of May 15.
He was dry and getting back into shape in Eldoret while living with Berardelli, who demanded
that he be home for dinner each night. Wanjiru just had to go to Nyahururu for one day to pay
his lawyer to settle the gun case. (Rosa had transferred money to Wanjiru's account because he
was out of cash.) Then he would be free to move to the U.S.
Berardelli let Wanjiru borrow a Toyota Prado and sent Gatheru along with him. But on the way to
Nyahururu that day Wanjiru's old habits returned. To Gatheru's dismay, Wanjiru wanted to make
multiple stops. A last hurrah, perhaps. The first was at the Tas Hotel bar in Nakuru, where
Wanjiru had drinks with friends. They left around 3:30 p.m., and Wanjiru then rendezvoused with
one of his girlfriends, Judy Wambui, while Gatheru waited.
They arrived in Nyahururu after 7 p.m., and Wanjiru had drinks with dinner at the Waterfalls
Resort. He made plans with Gatheru for training the following day, and then Gatheru left to go to
sleep. But Wanjiru kept drinking with a cousin and an employee. He was so drunk by the time
he left Waterfalls that he got into a dispute over the bill and ran his car into a gate in the parking
lot.
Around 10 p.m. he went from Waterfalls to another bar, Kawa Falls. A man who was working the
counter there says that Wanjiru was visibly drunk and that he left with Jane Nduta, a waitress at
Kawa Falls who later said, "I knew my life will never be the same again if I got married to him. I
would never have to work for anybody." Wanjiru and Nduta stopped for another drink at Jimrock
before heading back to Wanjiru's house around 11 p.m.
Three people who saw security footage from Wanjiru's compound that night say that about 15
minutes after Wanjiru arrived, Njeri showed up. According to statements given to the police by
Njeri, Nduta and Wanjiru's watchman, the women argued, and Njeri stormed out of the house
but not before putting a padlock on a metal security gate, locking Wanjiru and Nduta in the
bedroom. The current police theory, supported by Nduta's statements to the police and the
media, is that Wanjiru became enraged upon finding himself locked inside and ran out to the
balcony to yell for the key. He may then have tried to jump down from the balcony to chase his
wife, who left the compound, but in his drunken state he misjudged the descent and fell to the
ground.
Nobody saw him go down, but the watchman saw him lying there and called people to come get
him. When Gatheru arrived, he found his friend unconscious, with blood coming from the back
of his head and his mouth and nose. He was taking deep, gurgling breaths.
Within 15 minutes of arriving at Nyahururu District Hospital, which has no intensive care unit,
Wanjiru took one more deep breath, stretched his arms stiffly to his side and never breathed
again.

When the tape recorder is off, most of the people who were close to Wanjiru say they believe he
was murdered. The investigation was a disaster. After hastily calling the death a suicide, the
police failed to secure the crime scene, and any hope for pristine forensic evidence was lost
when the house was cleaned.
In Nyahururu there is widespread sentiment that the police were unhappy with Wanjiru after he
claimed he was framed on the gun charge, and many citizens think the police wanted his
money. Three people independently told SI that they were at the police station the morning of
May 16 and heard officers threaten to throw Wanjiru's brother, Simon, in jail if he did not turn
over Sammy's identity and ATM cards. Simon reluctantly confirmed that account.
Njeri told reporters that she had learned of Wanjiru's fall from the police. But both Ngatia and
Gatheru say that she called them around 11:30 p.m. the previous night to tell them that the
watchman had called her to say Sammy had fallen and was hurt.
Hannah Wanjiru is adamant that her son was hit in the back of the head and killed, and that
Njeri and the police were conspiring to take Sammy's money. Hannah forced the police to watch
security footage from her son's home in her presence, but the camera that was pointed at the
balcony was not functioning. (The footage shows several men entering the compound on foot.
The footage is dark, and the men have not been publicly identified. Because the balcony
camera was not working, people who saw the video say they could not tell if the men entered
before or after Wanjiru fell.)
In June, Hannah brandished a machete at her own relatives, demanding that they not bury her
son until an investigation was completed. (She lost a court battle to stop the burial.) For
unknown reasons Wanjiru's body was partly embalmed before it was thoroughly examined, and,
bewilderingly, 11 months after the national hero's death, no final autopsy report has been
issued. But a preliminary postmortem report released last June says that Wanjiru had injuries on
his hands and knees "consistent with conscious landing on fours" but that he died from blunt
trauma to the back of the head.
That report made headlines and fueled widespread suspicion in Kenya that Wanjiru was
murdered. SI gave a copy of the report and pictures of Wanjiru's balcony to Michael Baden, a
forensic pathologist and former chief medical examiner of New York City. Baden says that
Wanjiru suffered a "typical contrecoup injury to his head." A contrecoup injury generally occurs
when a person falls backward, and the signature is a fracture at the back of the head and
bruising on the front of the brain that occurs when it slams forward against the inside of the
skull. "That's what helps distinguish a fall versus an injury [in which] a person is hit in the head
while stationary," Baden says. "Falling from 10 feet is more than enough to cause this fatal
injury." The injury is most often seen in drunk people who slip while walking and fall backward
without twisting to protect themselves. Baden says Wanjiru may have tried to step over the
railing and fallen forward on all fours onto the sloped roof below the balcony and then tumbled
backward to the ground. Most of Wanjiru's friends doubt that he would have tried to get down
from the balcony intentionally; however, one of Wanjiru's closest friends, Norman Mathathi, told
SI that he and Wanjiru had jumped down from the balcony before.
But perhaps the reason that makes it hardest to believe a conspiracy theory about Wanjiru's
death is that if anyone wanted Sammy's money, it seems all he had to do was ask for it.
There is a Kikuyu saying: Ido cia mwene cimumaga thutha. (When the owner dies, they follow
him.) It refers primarily to living things, such as livestock. As Wanjiru's family has fought over his

estate, the investment closest to his heartthe dairy farm five miles outside of Nyahururuhas
wasted away.
Nobody tended to the cows after Wanjiru died, and most perished from neglect or were sold.
When James Mwangi, the veterinarian, visited in early February, he had to tear down branches
from Graveria trees to feed the two remaining animals, a skinny black heifer and an auburn
dairy cow, to keep them from starving. The auburn cow had once been the pride of the farm,
producing 10 gallons of milk a day. Wanjiru loved her. He named her Beijing, after his great
triumph.
In the Chinese capital, Wanjiru changed the marathon forever. Runners could once coast the
first 20 miles of major marathons, but since Wanjiru's bold example, the race has started when
the race actually starts. Thirteen of the 17 sub-2:05 finishes in history have come since
Wanjiru's epic performance at the Olympics. Expect Kenyans at the London Games to try to
break the rest of the world from the gun. That will be Wanjiru's legacy.
Now he rests, buried at the dairy farm. Mwangi, who is helping raise money for an ICU in the
town's hospital, returned there in mid-February to check on the two cows. The little black heifer
had died.
Now all that remains is Beijing.