How Did Agnes Ngetich Run a 28:46 10K World Record in Valencia?

by Jonathan Gault
January 17, 2024

On Sunday morning, Kenya’s Agnes Ngetich ran 28:46 to set the 10-kilometer road world record at the Valencia Ibercaja race in Spain. It was a stunning performance. Ngetich, who has track personal bests of 14:36.70 and 31:34.83, came through halfway in 14:13 — itself tying the world record for the road 5k. She improved the previous 10k record, held by Ethiopia’s Yalemzerf Yehualaw, by 28 seconds.

(Full race video – we’ve cued it to the final 40 seconds)

Agnes Ngetich poses after running 28:46

In so doing, she became the first woman in history to break 29:00 on any surface, blasting past the world record for 10,000 meters on the track of 29:01.03 set by Ethiopia’s Letesenbet Gidey in 2021. Ngetich did not merely break the 29:00 barrier in Valencia, she clobbered it — a performance all the more unlikely because it came from the 22-year-old Ngetich as opposed to an established star like Gidey or Sifan Hassan.

We’ve seen similar breakthroughs like this recently on the roads. Think of Kelvin Kiptum, who was largely unknown on the world stage until announcing himself with a 2:01:53 victory in his debut at the 2022 Valencia Marathon. Less than a year later, he would break Eliud Kipchoge‘s world record and run 2:00:35 in Chicago. Or think of Tigist Assefa, a converted 800-meter runner who, without any warning, ran 2:15:37 to win the 2022 Berlin Marathon. The next year, she returned to Berlin and ran 2:11:53 to take more than two minutes off the world record.

Perhaps the best comparison is Gidey. Back in the fall of 2019, less than a year after a 21-year-old Gidey earned bronze at the World Cross Country Championships, she went to an entirely new level on the roads, running a 15k world record of 44:20 — one of the greatest performances in the history of women’s distance running. At a time when the track 10,000 WR was 29:17, Gidey, whose track pbs then stood at 14:23 and 30:21, covered her (downhill) final 10k in a 15k in 29:13.

What did Ngetich accomplish less than a year ago? Just like Gidey, she earned bronze at World XC, and now, less than a year later, is obliterating her track pbs en route to a WR in a longer road race. And, like Gidey’s 44:20 in 2019, Ngetich’s run in Valencia on Sunday ranks as one of the best marks in history — if the scoring tables are to be believed (28:46 is worth 1317 points on World Athletics’ scoring tables — equivalent to 13:43 for 5k, 61:15 for the half marathon, and 2:12:02 for the marathon). The difference is Gidey had been a phenom long before then, winning the U20 race at World XC in 2015 and 2017. Ngetich’s past is not as decorated.

These sort of breakthroughs tend to produce plenty of cynicism. There are four main factors that, taken in some combination, could reasonably explain a performance like Ngetich’s 28:46, and three of them are pretty cynical.

Option 1: The course had to be short.

Option 2: Shoe technology has rendered times and records meaningless.

Option 3: Anyone who runs that fast must be doping.

Option 4: She’s a generational talent.

None of the first three responses is entirely unjustified, but let’s get to them in a minute.

“This is some kind of Faith Kipyegon in the making”

When we try to make sense of a time we’ve never seen before, sometimes we forget there is a living, breathing person at the center of it. That’s a source of frustration for Ngetich’s agent, Davor Savija of Ikaika Sports, who has long believed in the greatness of Ngetich and says context is often missing from these discussions.

Ask Savija about 28:46, and he is unequivocal: Ngetich is a top, top talent who is thriving now that she finally has the training environment in which to succeed.

“This is a generational talent that is here to stay,” Savija told LetsRun on Tuesday. “…This is some kind of Faith Kipyegon in the making.”

The context: Ngetich grew up poor in Kinamget, a tiny village near Kamwosor, 40 miles southeast of Eldoret. In early 2017, just weeks after her 16th birthday, Ngetich excelled in a series of U20 races, finishing second at the Discovery XC meet in Eldoret, winning the Central Rift Championships, and finishing 8th at the Kenyan U20 championships, just missing out on a spot on that year’s World Cross Country team. She was still raw — she raced barefoot, and her form was so ungainly that Savija nicknamed her “The Giraffe” — but her performances drew the interest of adidas, who signed her to a contract.

Savija was convinced he had unearthed a big talent. In a June 2017 Instagram post, he shared a blurry picture of a bench, a rooster, and a kettle dug into a dirt floor. It was from Ngetich’s home. The caption: “Livingroom of one major #Kenyan distance #runner in the making – purest diamond in the rough one could imagine.”

 

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Ngetich made marginal progress over the next few years. Because she was still in school and lacked access to proper coaching, Ngetich trained sparingly and rarely raced elite competitions. Her most notable performance during that span came at the 2021 Kenyan Olympic trials, where she finished 8th. Though she was more than 13 seconds away from making the team, she was the youngest athlete in the field and her time of 15:07 (at altitude in Nairobi) was a personal best.

It was not until the middle of 2022 that Ngetich’s running career began to take off. With her school commitments finished, that summer Ngetich moved to Iten to train in Ikaika’s camp under coach Julien Di Maria (aka “Kip Evans“), whose group includes 2:18 marathoner Joan Chelimo Melly (Di Maria’s wife) and 2021 New York City Marathon runner-up Viola Cheptoo. For the first time, Ngetich was able to train as a true professional athlete.

“Now [she] has a dream, now has food, now has three or four pacemakers, now has 150-kilometer weeks, now has Lornah [Kiplagat]’s [all-weather] track,” Savija says. “…Her World Athletics statistics, they don’t say the story of schooling – going to school [until 2022], physically not training at all in her last year, when she was [studying for] matriculation exams. Gaining weight, going through puberty, all of these things.”

Once she became a full-time professional runner, Ngetich quickly broke out by running 30:30 for 10k on the roads at the Brasov Running Festival in Romania in September 2022. She followed that up by earning the bronze medal at the World Cross Country Championships in February 2023. On the track, she qualified for the 2023 World Championships in Budapest, where she finished 6th in the 10,000 meters, but Savija says she was not at her best for that race due to bad menstrual cramping.

By the fall of 2023, Savija says, Ngetich was in incredible shape. In September, she ran 29:24 in Brasov for what she thought was a world record for a women’s-only 10k, only to find later that the course was 25 meters short. In November, she ran 29:26 in Lille. Neither race was fully optimized for speed — Ngetich led every step in Brasov without a pacemaker, while Lille featured wet and windy conditions. Two months later, she ran 28:46.

“On a perfect day in Valencia with a perfect course with a perfect pacemaker, she finally gets an opportunity to express the shape,” Savija says. “She’s been in this shape now for six months. But because people like to speak about shoes and doping, they are [too] lazy to look at the statistics.”

***

So, 28:46. By a woman. It still does not sound right. Is it real?

Let’s examine the more cynical explanations for Ngetich’s fast time.

Option 1: The course had to be short.

A number of road races have been found to be short in recent years from Abu Dhabi to Northern Ireland to Scotland. And considering the performance of the runner-up in Valencia, Emmaculate Anyango, who ran 28:57, was even more surprising than Ngetich, it’s understandable why some may wonder if the course was short in Valencia. Anyango, who was 4th at the Kenyan senior cross country championships as a 19-year-old in 2020 and ran 30:01 to finish 2nd behind Ngetich in Lille in November, was even less accomplished and less well-known than Ngetich and has now covered 10k faster than all but one woman in history.

But the men’s world record was also set on this course in 2020, and the men’s times on Sunday in Valencia, while fast, are believable — Uganda’s Jacob Kiplimo, who has run 26:33 on the track, finished first in 26:48. It’s not likely, but if the course was short, we’ll find out soon, considering Ngetich’s time still needs to be ratified to become an official world record.

Option 2: Shoe technology has rendered times and records meaningless.

Carbon plates and better, more responsive superfoams have changed the game and as a result, athletes have packed a generation’s worth of progress in terms of time into just a few years. It’s quite possible that the roads are now faster than the track. Ngetich wore the adidas Takumi Sen 9’s in Valencia, a shoe with a heel thickness of 33mm — permissible on the roads but above the 25mm limit for 10,000m races on the track. The shoes are not the only reason why Ngetich and Anyango ran fast on Sunday, but we are still getting adjusted to times that seemed impossible only a few years ago. Just look at the marathon, where the world records are now 2:00:35 and 2:11:53.

It was clear when Hassan and Gidey ran 10,000 world records within two days of each other in 2021 that both women were capable of going well under 29:00 on the track had the Wavelight been set for a faster pace. Put them in top form in Valencia on Sunday and it’s not hard to imagine them running 28:46 or faster.

Option 3: Anyone who runs that fast must be doping.

Ngetich has experienced a meteoric rise. At the Paris Diamond League on June 9, Ngetich ran 14:36 for 5,000 meters, all-out. In Oslo six days later, she ran 8:32 for 3,000 meters (that’s 14:13 5k pace). Seven months later in Valencia, Ngetich came through 5k in 14:13 and followed it up with a 14:33. Even for a monster talent, that’s a rapid progression.

I ask Savija: what would he say to someone who said Ngetich could only accomplish this through doping?

“Of course, I understand that people will be skeptical,” Savija says. “I am skeptical of so many things. But I know myself and I think that I know her. I can’t fight people’s skepticisms. I can’t fight people’s frustrations. I’m not a denialist of Kenyan doping problem. I never was and never will be.”

It must be noted that Savija is also the agent of the men’s 10k road world record holder, Rhonex Kipruto, who was provisionally suspended in May 2023 for an Athlete Biological Passport violation. Kipruto’s case is ongoing — it has been referred to a disciplinary tribunal — and Savija has stood by Kipruto, with Ikaika publishing a lengthy defense in support of him last year. Savija is the only connection between Kipruto and Ngetich — they train in different camps under different coaches.

But it should also be noted that Savija has long pushed to strengthen the sport’s anti-doping infrastructure. In 2017, he was lobbying for road races to kick in money for more rigorous out-of-competition testing long before the Athletics Integrity Unit required Label Road Race its to do just that. In 2020, he made a written offer — one that still stands — for the AIU to test and monitor athletes in the Ikaika camp 24 hours a day so they could better understand their physiology under different conditions and during different portions of the season. He has offered the AIU use of his clients in a study to track maximum hemoglobin mass in parallel to their Athlete Biological Passport.

“No agent involved in doping would be offering something like that,” Savija says. “You can quote me on this because, as Americans would say, I have receipts.”

Ngetich has been part of World Athletics’ Registered Testing Pool since the start of 2023 and has never been sanctioned.

Ngetich’s next aim is to make the Kenyan team for the World Cross Country Championships in Belgrade on March 30, where she hopes to improve upon her bronze medal. Beyond that, the Olympics in Paris beckon. If Ngetich is the generational talent Savija believes her to be, she will have the opportunity to show it soon.

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