There are 83 international student athletes competing at Florida, and each of them has their own unique story or path to the NCAA and to Gainesville. For Kelvin Cheruiyot, the Gators’ newest cross country standout, his trip from Kenya to the United States simply started by following his friends.
“In 2024, I was fully focused on going to compete in the NCAA because I had a lot of friends [there],” Cheruiyot said. “Brian Musau and Denis Kipngetich told me that, ‘You must come to the NCAA,’ when they came back for the summer and I was training with them, they motivated me.”
Musau and Kipngetich have risen to the apex of collegiate distance running since beginning their careers at Oklahoma State in 2023. Both men have placed inside the top 11 finishers at the NCAA Cross Country Championships each of the past two years, and Musau swept the indoor and outdoor 5000-meter titles on the track this spring.
Inspiration drawn from others has played a significant role in Cheruiyot’s running journey. After growing up in the small village of Samitui, Kenya, he moved to Iten to train. One of the most significant training hubs in the distance running world, the town of a little over 42,000 people has produced Olympic and world champions such as David Rudisha and Mary Keitany, with several more global medalists and record holders to boot. Every day in Iten, Cheruiyot was surrounded by greatness.
“In our community, we have a lot of athletes running for different companies… like Adidas or Nike,” Cheruiyot said. “I was seeing them winning or being on the podium, and that was the motivation that kept me pushing.”
The Recruiting Trail
In June 2021, Cheruiyot made the decision to go all-in on running. Four years later, with his friends’ collegiate success fresh in his mind, he began talking to coaches in the U.S.
The recruitment of Kenyan athletes can be vastly different from the typical routines of recruiting American athletes, according to Florida associate head coach Will Palmer.
“A lot of what we do is rely on coaches to vet athletes for us,” Palmer said. “There’s not as many hard-and-fast race results… so a lot of it is just word of mouth, getting connected with coaches that are reputable and have a sense of the young talent.”
Cheruiyot certainly fit the bill of a talented runner.
One of the factors that makes Iten such a hotbed of running stardom is that it sits nearly 8,000 feet above sea level. In the thinner air of high-altitude training camps, runners become more accustomed to producing higher levels of red blood cells because of low oxygen levels. It’s incredibly challenging to run well over long distances at these heights, but it makes it far easier to run closer to sea level where oxygen is more abundant.
In Kenya, Cheruiyot ran personal bests of 13:47.70 for 5000 meters and 8:09.09 for 3000 meters. Those times don’t come particularly close to even ranking inside the top 50 performances by NCAA athletes last season at face value, however, a conversion to sea level tells a very different story. Having run both of those times at elevations in excess of 6,000 feet, they come out as 13:12.15 and 7:46.63 when put through Dr. Thomas Schwartz’s Altitude Conversion Calculator. Cheruiyot’s converted marks stack up much better, ranking eighth and 32nd in the nation this spring, respectively.
Following his friends to Stillwater, Oklahoma, would have been an obvious choice for Cheruiyot, but he says there was no room left on Oklahoma State’s roster when his recruitment was getting underway. North Alabama looked like an option at one point, but Cheruiyot quickly made up his mind once Palmer called.
“When the chance of UF came, I said, ‘Yes, I must go to UF,” Cheruiyot said. “UF is a really big school compared to North Alabama.”
An additional factor in his decision was that, unlike Florida, UNA only races during the cross country season and does not have a track program.
Securing Cheruiyot’s commitment was only half the battle for Palmer. The legal processes of bringing international student athletes to the U.S. can prove difficult, especially when there was a temporary freeze on student visas over the summer.
“There was a period of time where he wasn’t doing a whole lot of training because the process of getting a student visa was pretty arduous and time consuming,” Palmer said. “There was honestly a period of time where he was pretty down in the dumps, like, ‘I don’t even know if I’m gonna end up at Florida,’ because there were no student visas being issued.”
With time, the legislative roadblocks worked themselves out, and Palmer praised Cheruiyot’s timeliness and the "methodical" nature he had in getting his academic paperwork sorted. By the time August came about, he was ready to become a Gator.
Welcome To The NCAA
Over 7,800 miles from Iten and in the U.S. for the first time in his life, Cheruiyot had to acclimate quickly to life in Gainesville with the season’s first race approaching. Fortunately, he joined a team with three other Kenyan athletes to help the transition feel more comfortable.
“I didn’t talk with [Hilda Olemomoi, Judy Chepkoech and Desma Chepkoech] when I was in Kenya,” Cheruiyot said, “but getting here and knowing people from where I come from, it feels like I’m home because I have some people and we can talk Swahili.”
There weren’t any major adjustments to training under Palmer, as Cheruiyot was accustomed to running two workouts and around 80 miles per week. The biggest difference between life in Iten and life in Gainesville was the weather. Mean daily highs in Iten are in the 70s year-round, compared to Gainesville’s 89.5 degree mean high during September.
“My first experience was that it’s very hot here,” Cheuiyot said. “I came with a big hoodie, and Coach Palmer was telling me that you have to remove this. It was very hot and it’s like midnight.”
In his first race for Florida, Cheruiyot proved that despite only being stateside for a little over a month, he was ready to make waves on the national stage. At the Gans Creek Classic on Sept. 26, he ran a well-executed race, remaining patient over the opening kilometers before surging at the finish to end in 16th.
“I just wanted to gauge myself and where I’d be,” Cheruiyot said. “So I said, ‘Today, let me not run in the front, let me start in the back’... In the middle, I was really doing well because I had a lot of energy and was passing a lot.”
The Florida men’s team is very young, as none of the nine athletes are upperclassmen. While he’s just as new to collegiate racing as the rest of his teammates, Cheruiyot’s talent shone through in Columbia and gave his fellow Gators a bolt of inspiration.
“I was very impressed with his last race,” sophomore Josh Ruiz said. “I was talking to Coach Palmer in the airport, and he told me… ‘Be less impressed and more involved.’ That’s sort of what I’m trying to take away from Kelvin. I’m impressed by him, but also we need to get involved and get closer to him.”
The impact of Kenyan athletes in the NCAA cross country landscape has become a hot-button issue in recent years, with outspoken critics such as Furman coach Rita Gary arguing that international student athletes hurt the prospects of domestic ones. However, Palmer sees the benefits Cheruiyot brings to the team that an outside perspective may miss.
“Sometimes if you’re not surrounded by some of those people, you tend to put those things on a pedestal,” Palmer said. “You start to bring it down to earth a little bit and realize, ‘If I train hard, if I apply myself and I’m disciplined in my approach, maybe I can do similar sorts of things.’”
On The Horizon
Florida’s, and therefore Cheruiyot’s, next race is back in Columbia for the Missouri Pre-National Invitational on Oct. 17. With an eye on running a more aggressive race against a tougher field, he’ll aim to take another step towards his season’s goal.
“The target is getting to nationals,” Cheruiyot said, “and we have to do it as a team.”
While Oklahoma State will be in the same race as Florida on Oct.17, Musau and Kipngetich are absent from the startlist. However, if Cheruiyot can make his dream of qualifying for the National Championship a reality, he’ll be almost guaranteed to square off with his old training partners, who are the two best runners for the second-ranked Cowboys.
“Maybe I call it a reunion,” Cheruiyot said. “Meeting them again in the NCAA would be a huge reunion and it would be a life goal.”
Contact Paul Hof-Mahoney at phof-mahoney@alligator.org. Follow him on X at @phofmahoney.
Paul is a senior sports journalism student and is the cross country/track and field reporter in his third semester with The Alligator. In his free time, you can catch him scrolling Twitter to keep up with an endless flood of track results and training for the media 800-meter race at the World Athletics Championships.
