It’s amazing nothing has wiped the smile off John Bitok’s face.

The customs barrier that hit him like a battering ram when he arrived in Syracuse from Kenya four years ago didn’t stop him. He coped with the injuries that kept him off his feet nearly all of his freshman year. He suffered the agony of falling one place short of qualifying for the NCAA cross country championships his junior year.

Then when Bitok was primed for the most important race of his collegiate career, his brother died and he rushed home to spend seven sleepless days with his family in Kenya, effectively throwing away his best chance at glory.

Now the graduated senior has closed the book on his storied SU career sans epilogue by passing on his last year of eligibility as a collegiate athlete. His freshman year injuries limited his participation to what could have been a redshirt year, giving him one last shot at redemption this year. Bitok gave it all up, though, and he’s still smiling with each step.

‘You can never stay in one place the whole time and say you’ve had a great experience,’ Bitok said. ‘It was time to move on. I’m happy where I am now.’

It will be a bittersweet reunion when the Syracuse cross country team travels to Bitok’s new hometown of Boston for the Big East Championships on Friday. He’ll no longer be leading the pack of Orange like he did the last two years, when he finished eighth at the race. Instead, Bitok will be taking a day off from his full-time job as a research assistant at Harvard Medical School to cheer on his teammates.

But Bitok isn’t blaming anyone. It was his decision to leave Syracuse in May to pursue his academic endeavors in organic synthesis. After breaking his foot in January and being sidelined until the summer, he wondered what life offered if he couldn’t run anymore. Bitok had no choice but to fall back on academics because if he didn’t act quickly, he’d be returning to Kenya next year because of an expired visa.

It’s not that he feared returning home. He just wanted to do more for his family before he came home. The death of his eldest brother left him as his family’s biggest provider. He needed to earn a paycheck so his family could survive.

‘Since he’s been here, there’s been a lot of pressure to provide for his family back home,’ cross country coach Jay Hartshorn said. ‘For $100, he can put a cousin through school for a year.’

It’s just another sacrifice Bitok has made to bring a smile to others while giving up the things that matter most to him. His running is relegated to 6 a.m. workouts while his days are spent working in labs and applying to graduate schools on the weekends.

The dreams of being an Olympic runner are still in the back of Bitok’s mind, but the vision of getting a medical degree and returning home to help the poor Kenyans who don’t receive proper medical attention is in the forefront.

‘When my brother died, that changed everything,’ Bitok said. ‘It was scary. It really put running in perspective.’

His humbling trip home reminded him of the poverty his countrymen faced. He had to pay for the majority of the funeral costs because his family could not. Running took a backseat to his family’s well-being.

He said it felt like in two seconds his world got turned upside down. Only days after running in the Big East Championships, Bitok heard the grim news about his brother and boarded a plane for Kenya immediately. It took him nearly 24 hours to finally reach his home.

Once there, his training stopped. After a week of grieving and caring for his family, Bitok returned to Syracuse, only to depart the next morning for the NCAA Regionals. He’d spent nearly 30 hours traveling and hadn’t slept in a week, yet somehow he found himself at the starting line trying to improve on his ninth-place finish from the year before.

‘I don’t even remember anything about that race,’ said Bitok, who fell down twice during the race and finished 50th.

‘Just to get to the starting line was amazing,’ junior teammate Chris Muldoon said. ‘It was one of those meets where results weren’t going to matter as much as him just being out there and running.’

It was an abrupt ending to a brief but colorful legacy that Bitok left behind. The two-time All-Big East selection and constant mainstay in the lead pack is the best distance runner Hartshorn said she’s ever coached.

‘To get us more noticed as a team really helped everyone,’ Hartshorn said. ‘After seeing a person in a Syracuse uniform do that well, it made others think they could do it, too.

‘John probably had the most potential of any runner to come through here. He just never had a lot of breaks.’

Bitok never had a full season of training because injuries or other circumstances continued to put a kink in his schedule. But that didn’t stop Bitok from leaving a lasting impression on his teammates.

‘With the injuries he had, we kind of got used to not having him at practice,’ Muldoon said. ‘Having him was a treat. He’s one of those guys where it doesn’t take long until you feel like you know him.’

Muldoon brought Bitok home for four days during the summer after his freshman year, and his friends and family still ask how Bitok is doing.

‘My grandparents ask me about whether I’m bringing John home before they ask me when I’m coming home,’ Muldoon said.

The always smiling and always sociable John Bitok – that is whom everyone remembers. And that’s who will be cheering on the Orange at Friday’s race, content with his new lifestyle and devoid of the disappointment and anguish he endured along the way.

‘I’m excited to see him,’ Muldoon said. ‘When we’re racing, I know he’s going to pop out and we’re going to see him about 18 times during the race. For the guys that knew him, it’s going to be really inspirational.’

Published on October 25, 2004 at 12:00 pm