Bedan Karoki out to turn silver into gold in Rio Olympics

A silver medallist at both the World Half Marathon and World Cross Country championships, Bedan Karoki is eager to shed the bridesmaid tag and elevate himself to the coveted gold medal status.

Karoki’s stellar career is reminiscent of Ethiopia’s perennial bridesmaid, Sileshi Sihine, who retired without a gold medal to his collection.

Sihine married multiple world and Olympic champion Tirunesh Dibaba after ending his career that saw him bag a record five championship silvers in the 10,000 and 5,000 metres, including in the 2004 and 2008 Olympics.

The only gold medal in his collection came from the 10,000 metres in the 2003 All Africa Games in Abuja.

HANDED WILD CARD

Karoki was handed a wildcard entry in Kenya’s Rio Olympics squad and will team up with another wild card, Geoffrey Kamworor who beat him to gold at both last year’s IAAF World Cross Country Championships in Guiyang, China, and this year’s IAAF World Half Marathon Championships in Cardiff.

Paul Tanui is the other athlete in Kenya’s 10,000m having won the trials at Kipchoge Keino Stadium in Eldoret.

Bizarrely, Kenya has never won a 10,000m Olympic gold since Naftali Temu clinched Kenya’s first Olympic gold at the 1968 Games in Mexico.

Like Tanui, Karoki is based in Japan. There was even an April Fools’ Day joke in Japan last year that Karoki was lured to take up Japanese citizenship, with his DeNA corporate team even announcing that his paperwork had been done during a press conference in Shibuya, Tokyo.

The joke went that DeNA chief executive Isao Moriyasu told journalists that having lived in Japan for 10 years and having passed the highest level of the Japanese Language Proficiency Test, Karoki was primed to be Japanese.

On to serious matters, Karoki is happy with his training in Eldoret.

“My training is going on well and I’m very happy that we are teaming up with my friend Geoffrey Kamworor who normally encourages me to press on during the competitions,” said Karoki.

He added that he feels that his body is responding well and the Briton Mo Farah will have a hard time defending his title at the Rio Olympics Games.

“It’s true Mo Farah has been giving us a hard time but this time round we might beat him. In the World half Marathon race in March this year, we managed to beat him and we learnt a trick which we want to use this year,” said Karoki, who hails from Nyahururu.

After finishing his primary education, Karoki went to high school in Japan.

At the last Olympics in London, he was fifth in the 10,000m before finishing sixth at the World Championships in Moscow in 2013. Last year, he won a silver medal in the World Cross Country Championships in Guiyang before finishing fourth in the 10,000m at last year’s World Championships in Beijing.