Rebecca Cheptegei

Rebecca Cheptegei was born in Cheminy, in the Bukwo District of eastern Uganda, near the Kenyan border. She came up through the East African distance running pipeline that has produced most of the world’s best marathoners and trail runners over the last two decades. She served in the Uganda People’s Defence Force as an active soldier while training, the same kind of military-athlete arrangement that has supported many of Uganda’s elite distance runners.

The career was a fast build. In 2021 she won the senior short trail race at the World Mountain and Trail Running Championships in Chiang Mai, Thailand — Uganda’s first World Trail title in the discipline. In 2022 she won the Padova Marathon outright, finished second in the 10,000 metres at the Ugandan National Championships in Kampala, and set the Ugandan national record in the marathon at 2:22:47, a time that put her in the conversation for any major championship marathon her country could enter her in. She was selected for Uganda’s marathon team for the 2024 Paris Olympics, where she ran the women’s marathon on August 11, 2024. She finished 44th. Her plans were to keep building toward the next major.

She had bought a small property in Trans Nzoia County, Kenya — close to the Iten and Eldoret high-altitude training centers along the Uganda-Kenya border where many East African elite runners are based. Her ex-partner, Dickson Ndiema Marangach, had been involved in a dispute with her over the property. On September 1, 2024 he came to her home, doused her with gasoline, and set her on fire in front of her two daughters. She was rushed to Moi Teaching and Referral Hospital in Eldoret with severe burns and died there on September 5, 2024 at age 33. Marangach died from his own burns from the same attack four days later.

Her death was the third public murder of a top East African female distance runner by an intimate partner in three years, following Agnes Tirop (Kenya, October 2021) and Damaris Mutua (Kenya, April 2022). The pattern has produced sustained advocacy from current and former elite runners, the Tirop’s Angels foundation, and the Athletics Federation of Uganda for stronger protections for women in East African athletics. Cheptegei’s body was returned to Bukwo for burial. Uganda recognized her with a state funeral. Padova organizers committed to honoring her at future editions of the marathon she had won.

She is on this site for one reason that overrules every other consideration: the work was hers. The Ugandan national record was hers. The Padova win was hers. The World Trail title was hers. The Olympic team selection was hers. None of it was given. None of it was lost to her own choices. It was taken from her by another person’s act of violence, and that act does not get to define what is told about her career. The career stands. So does her name. So does the long list of races she should have run.