How David Rudisha grew from a tall, shy Masai to an Olympic champion

Film maker went to Kenya in 2005 to track down legendary coach Colm O’Connell and stumbled across a 16-year-old who would go on to be one of the world’s great athletes

Film maker went to Kenya in 2005 to track down legendary coach Colm O’Connell and stumbled across a 16-year-old who would go on to be one of the world’s great athletes

We first travelled to Kenya in the spring of 2004, not to meet David Rudisha but on a research mission to track down a mercurial, almost mythic figure: an Irish missionary called Brother Colm O’Connell. I had stumbled upon a reference to Colm in an article that sought to explain the incredible success of Kenya’s Kalenjin people in middle-distance running. I was unconvinced by the notion of a “fast running gene” but captivated by the article’s casual mention of an old Irish missionary teaching in remotest Kenya who, in 30 years, had coached 20 or so world-class athletes to Olympic and world championship glory. When my friend and co-director Jim de Zoete suggested we go on our own mission to track down Brother Colm and see if there was a documentary to be made, I thought: “Why not”?

We were not disappointed by Colm’s tales of the past and his role in the broader narrative of a young nation whose athletics heroes helped forge Kenya’s identity. But what really struck us was the incongruous figure he cut in a more unforgiving and uncertain present: an amateur coach in an area of Kenya increasingly awash with professional coaches and agents; a religious man on the fringes of a highly commercial sport. He embodied the values of an earlier era in a world that was changing around him fast. We figured that the best way of exploring Colm’s role as an athletics coach would be to follow his progress with the next generation of athletes coming through his junior training camps, held every April and December.

That is how I ended up resigning from my pre-television job in March 2005 and jumping on a plane to Kenya with Jim, armed with a couple of books on documentary making and some basic camera and sound equipment. Two days later we were in Iten filming young aspiring athletes arrivingat St Patrick’s School for the start of Brother Colm’s four-week training camp. What neither Jim nor I could have foreseen was that one of these kids – a painfully shy, very tall Maasai boy – would turn out to be one of the greatest athletes in the world.

Looking through the 2005 camp footage now you can sense David’s confidence as an athlete growing as well as Colm’s realisation that he had a special talent on his hands. At the end of the camp, David, then 16, ran his first ever 800m race and won in 1min 50sec, just 10 seconds shy of his future world records. What struck us was Brother Colm’s understated reaction but we came to realise that as classic Colm, a down-to-earth approach that ensures neither David, nor anyone else, get too carried away with his success.

Over the next seven years we returned to see the unfolding story of Rudisha and Brother Colm but their Olympic and world-beating glory was not straightforward. It was in London, in 2012, on the grandest stage of all, that David finally won the gold medal and the narrative arc of our film from the village to the world was finally complete.