Stephen Kiprotich
Kiprotich at the Paris Half Marathon, March 2014
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| Personal information | |||||||||||||||||||
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| Nationality | Ugandan | ||||||||||||||||||
| Born |
27 February 1989 Kapchorwa District, Uganda |
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| Height | 1.72 m (5 ft 8 in) (2012) | ||||||||||||||||||
| Weight | 56 kg (123 lb) (2012) | ||||||||||||||||||
| Sport | |||||||||||||||||||
| Sport | Running | ||||||||||||||||||
| Event(s) | Long distance | ||||||||||||||||||
| Achievements and titles | |||||||||||||||||||
| Olympic finals |
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| Personal best(s) |
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Medal record
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Stephen Kiprotich ("KIP-roh-tich", born 27 February 1989) is a Ugandan long-distance runner, born in Kapchorwa District. He is an Olympic marathon champion, having won gold at the 2012 London Summer Olympics. He also won gold at the 2013 World Championships in Athletics. He is the second person, after Gezahegne Abera, to follow an Olympic marathon gold medal with a world championship gold medal for the same event. He clinched the Olympic gold 2012 Olympic champion with a winning time of 2:08:01 in hot, sunny, and humid conditions. This was the first Olympic medal for Uganda since 1996, the first Olympic gold medal for the country since 1972, and the country's first ever in the marathon. He won the Moscow IAAF championship marathon on 17 August 2013.
He is the youngest of seven children of subsistence farmers from Kapchorwa District, near the Uganda-Kenya border. As a child, he missed three years of elementary school due to an undiagnosed illness. From 2004 to 2006, he quit athletics to concentrate on school. Then, at the age of 17, he quit school and moved to the Eldoret region of Kenya, in the Rift Valley, to train for the marathon with Eliud Kipchoge. He was assisted by A Running Start, a non-profit foundation based in New York.
He ran a personal best in the marathon of 2:07:20 in 2011 at the Enschede Marathon in the Netherlands, which set a new course record for the Enschede Marathon and a new Ugandan record in athletics. He finished third in the 2012 Tokyo Marathon with a time of 2:07:50.
He was inspired in part by John Akii-Bua, the only previous Ugandan Olympic gold medalist, who won the 400 metres hurdles in the 1972 Olympics in Munich, Germany, setting a new world record in the process. He then went on to win the London 2012 Olympic Marathon, ahead of Kenyan runners Abel Kirui and Wilson Kipsang Kiprotich who finished second and third respectively.
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