Henry Rono, runner who broke four world records within a few weeks in 1978 – obituary
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Henry Rono, who has died aged 72, was a Kenyan long distance runner who came to global attention in 1978 by breaking four different world records in the space of 81 days.
During an astonishing period between April and June that year, Rono posted the fastest ever times in the 10,000m (27 minutes 22.5 seconds), the 5,000m (13min 8.4sec), the 3,000m steeplechase (8min 5.4sec) and the 3,000m (7min 32.1sec) – a feat that has never remotely been matched, either before or since.
Not only did Rono set new records, he smashed the old ones to smithereens – lowering the 10,000m by more than seven seconds, the 5,000m by 4.5 seconds, the steeplechase by 2.6 seconds and the 3,000m by three seconds.
Virtually unknown before he set off on his extraordinary summer escapade, which included a winning streak of 31 outdoor races, Rono became a worldwide sensation, and was hailed by the Associated Press as “beyond dispute the greatest distance runner ever”. Yet the next few years failed to deliver the haul of medals everyone expected of him, and his career tally was a modest two golds at the Commonwealth Games and two at the All-Africa Games – each won during his annus mirabilis in 1978.
That he failed to accumulate more was partly down to the fact that Kenya boycotted the 1980 Olympics in Moscow, when Rono was still close to his prime, and that by the time the next Olympics came along in 1984 he was a busted flush, having succumbed to alcoholism.
Born Kipwambok Rono on February 12 1952 in the village of Kiptaragon in the Nandi Hills of Kenya’s Rift Valley, Henry, as he preferred to be known, had a challenging upbringing: his father died in a tractor accident when he was young, and his widowed mother could barely afford to keep him in school for most of the time.
Running proved to be an escape, and despite being unable to walk until the age of six due to a cycling mishap, he was inspired to move into athletics by the efforts of the Kenyan Kip Keino, who won Olympic gold in 1968.
After Rono joined the army in 1973 his running began to take off, and three years later he was chosen to represent Kenya at the 1976 Olympics in Montreal. However, in common with many other African countries Kenya decided to boycott those games over arguments about sporting links with apartheid South Africa, and so he never competed.
It was in 1976 that Rono, though he could barely speak any English, moved to the United States on a scholarship at Washington State University. His initial world record, in the 5,000m, came in a low-key triangular college meeting at the University of California’s Edwards Field track in Berkeley on April 9 1978, and the 3,000m steeplechase mark was achieved in front of 200 people at the Northwest Relays meeting at Husky Stadium in Seattle on May 13.
Less than a month later, on June 11, he broke the 10,000m record on a rather bigger stage, in Vienna, this time with a pacemaker, and then, at the Bislett Games in Oslo on 27 June, he demolished Brendan Foster’s long-standing 3,000m record.
It was during this period that Rono also won his four gold medals – in the 3,000m steeplechase and 10,000m at the All-Africa Games in Algeria and in the Commonwealth Games in Canada in the 3,000m steeplechase and 5,000m.
No one, perhaps including Rono himself, quite knew how he had reached such peaks, for as Jonathan Rosen of The New York Times noted, he had run mainly “on a diet of cheeseburgers and Budweiser”. None the less he had great willpower, and despite being a shy and undemonstrative character was able to take races by the scruff of the neck.
After missing out on an Olympics for a second time with the 1980 boycott of Moscow, Rono left Washington State the following year. By then, however, the Budweiser had become an even bigger feature of his training regime. In September 1981 he broke his own 5,000m world record while running with a severe hangover, but it was more or less the last time he got away with such excess.
He later admitted that most of the next decade was “a blank”: Rono’s running went to pieces, as did his personal life. Occasionally homeless, he moved around America for a number of years, taking on various low-paid jobs and sometimes finding himself in trouble with the law.
He was eventually able to confront and defeat his alcoholism in the early 1990s, and by the end of that decade had gained a teaching qualification. In retirement in 2019 he moved back to his home village in Kenya, reflecting that he was far more proud of having dragged himself out of the abyss than of his many achievements in athletics.
Henry Rono, born February 12 1952, died February 15 2024
