Elijah Lagat

Elijah Lagat ( born June 19, 1966) is a former Kenyan long-distance runner, who had his greatest success in the marathon.

Lagat was employed in the Kenyan Ministry of Education, as the end of 1992 a doctor whom he had visited because of heart problems, advised him to lose weight and exercise. In early 1993 he began regularly to run, and he not only lost a total of 15 kg of his body weight, but also noted that he achieved outstanding results in competitions, so he decided after a year to pursue running as a competitive sport.

In 1995, he succeeded with a victory at the 25 km from Berlin in 1:16:16 and a second place at the Frankfurt Marathon in 2:12:40, the first international successes. In 1997 he won the Prague Marathon with the still valid course record of 2:08:52 and the 1998 Berlin Marathon with his personal best of 2:07:41.

In 2000, he sat down at the Boston Marathon in a dramatic final against Gezahegne Abera and Moses Tanui by. The distance to Abera was less than one second, the on Tanui three seconds. Lagat has now been nominated by the Kenyan Association for the 2000 Summer Olympics in Sydney, but soon ruled it out of the team. As an explanation of the association stated unwillingness to training, while others traced this decision to the practice adopted by him criticizing the sports officials of his country.

After Ondoro Osoro, one of the later nominated by the Association of runners, was seriously injured in a robbery, Lagat moved then still in the Olympic team after. He now sought to be justified by a particularly hard preparing his application, however, fell into a state of overtraining and not reached the marathon of Sydney target.

The following year, he joined again in Boston, but was only Seventeenth. With a sixth place at the Millennium Marathon in Madrid ( 2:12:25 ) in the same year went his marathon career to an end.