Rosemary Wanjiru
Rosemary Monica Wanjiru is a Kenyan female long-distance runner who competes in the 5000 metres and 10,000 metres. She was a silver medallist at the African Games in 2015 and represented her country at the IAAF World Athletics Championships in 2019, finishing fourth in the 10,000 m.
Wanjiru moved to Japan as a teenager and began competing in long-distance competitions there. She was runner-up in the 3000 metres at the 2012 National Sports Festival of Japan and won the national high schools championship over that distance the following year along with the Chiba International Cross Country title. In 2014 she began competing in Corporate Japanese competitions for Team Starts. In her first year of corporate competition she was East Japan champion over 1500 metres and 3000 m. She won the 2015 Sanyo Women's 10K and the 5000 m at the Japan Corporate Track and Field Championships, Oda Memorial and Nobeoka Golden Games.
Wanjiru made her international debut at the 2015 African Games and won a silver medal in the 5000 m, forming a Kenyan sweep of the medals alongside Margaret Chelimo and Alice Aprot. The year after she was beaten into second place at the Japan Corporate Championships by another Kenyan, Ann Karindi Mwangi. She repeated as champion at the Oda Memorial and Sanyo Women's 10K. In 2017 and 2018 she won both the Japan Corporate title and the Oda Memorial 5000 m.
In 2019, Wanjiru began to compete more frequently outside of Japan. She won the Lilac Bloomsday Run and Cherry Blossom Ten Mile Run in the United States before going on to place third in the 10,000 m at the Kenyan Athletics Championships. This earned her her second international selection for Kenya, this time at the 2019 World Athletics Championships. At the World Championships she teamed up with compatriots Agnes Jebet Tirop and Hellen Obiri to lead the pace. She fell away from the leaders in the final stage of the race and ended the race in fourth place, behind Sifan Hassan, Letesenbet Gidey and Tirop.International competitions
