In September 2021, Agnes Tirop broke the women’s 10,000 meter road world record. Just five weeks later, she was dead. Her husband was arrested and charged with murder. Tirop’s death sent shockwaves through the athletics community, but it also cast a light on the gender-based violence faced by many female Kenyan runners. Their success can be a lure for men who offer their services to young runners as coaches or managers and sometimes marry them. In many cases, these men have little formal training or experience, but they end up having financial control over the women’s lives.
In this documentary we examine the life and death of one of the world’s best athletes, as well as the success of Kenyan women runners on the international stage. Bloomberg gained unprecedented access to hundreds of pages of court documents as well as Tirop’s family and friends to reveal the difficult path she faced.
Though we focus on the tragic story of Agnes Tirop, our hope is that this piece will shed light on the much broader problem of gender-based violence and help other women who are suffering in silence.
