The day Tegla Loroupe took New York

On Sunday 6 November 1994, Tegla Loroupe crossed the finish line in Central Park in 2 hours, 27 minutes and 37 seconds. She was 21, it was her first major marathon, and she had just won New York. No African woman had won a major marathon before that day.

Nearly 30,000 people finished the race that year. She was the first woman home.

Where she came fromKenya's far north

Loroupe grew up in West Pokot, in Kenya's far north, where her Pokot community had long fought its neighbours over grazing land. That background would end up shaping the second half of her life as much as running shaped the first.

1994–1995Then she did it again

One win can be called a surprise. Twelve months later she went back to New York and won it again, which settled that question. Across the late 1990s she also won three straight world half marathon titles and took bronze over 10,000 metres at the 1995 and 1999 World Championships.

1998–1999The fastest woman alive

On 19 April 1998, in Rotterdam, she ran 2:20:47. That took 19 seconds off a world best Norway's Ingrid Kristiansen had held for almost 13 years. The next year in Berlin she broke her own mark, running 2:20:43. She was the first African woman to hold the marathon world record, and she kept it until September 2001.

The second raceRunning for peace

In 2003 she started the Tegla Loroupe Peace Foundation and began organising annual Peace Marathons back home. The foundation later set up a training centre for refugee athletes.

At the 2016 Rio Olympics she was chef de mission of the first-ever Refugee Olympic Team: ten athletes from South Sudan, Syria, the Democratic Republic of Congo and Ethiopia, five of whom came from Kenya's Kakuma refugee camp. That October she was named UN Person of the Year in Kenya, and she led the team again at Tokyo 2020.

Thirty-two years onWhere it all started

She went on to win marathons in London, Rotterdam, Berlin and Rome. But New York in 1994 is the one that changed things. Every African woman who has won a big-city marathon since ran through a door Tegla Loroupe opened that Sunday.