Strong powerful legs slam the tartan floor, each stride gaining an increasingly large distance from the rest of the field. Arms pumping gently, mouth slightly ajar, his body moves in a methodical rhythm. Suddenly, oozing a combination of grace and power, he quickens the pace, his eyes locked on the stopwatch ahead. A crescendo applause fills the stadium as he glides towards the finish line. “They’ve done it again,” the commentator roars, “Kenya takes the gold medal.” Heartfelt celebrations ensue as he fights against the post-race exhaustion. One man has an entire nation on its feet. Glory!
Every four years at the Olympic Games, an interpretation of this scene seems to occur in the track events. Since the incomparable Kipchoge Keino won two medals in Mexico in 1968, Kenyan athletes have dominated middle to long distance running at the Olympic Games.
While the Games are never without drama, the months preceding are usually fairly calm for athletes. This year was an exception. The months before the 2016 Rio Olympics proved to be arguably the most contentious period for Kenyan athletes in the nation’s Olympic history. From delayed legislation, to surprise Twitter announcements, Kenyan athletes and supporters rode a rollercoaster of emotions before the East African nation was finally given the green light to participate in the Games this August.
The strife first emerged at the beginning of the year when the World Anti-Doping Agency (Wada) announced that Kenya would be placed on a watch list. Stemming from a Wada report that was bolstered by more claims of bribery, extortion and Kenya’s legislation towards doping (or lack thereof), the country was in hot water. In February, Wada Director General David Howman stated
“Wada is most disturbed by these reports regarding extortion and bribery at the national level of sport,” said Wada Director General, David Howman, after claims that Athletics Kenya had asked two banned Kenyan athletes for a bribe in exchange for a shorter sentence.
Following these claims, the country missed two Wada deadlines to establish anti-doping legislation (February and April). The athletics powerhouse was officially at risk of being banned from the 2016 Games. In April, however, President Uhuru Kenyatta assured the nation that an Anti-Doping Bill would be passed by Parliament and that he would sign it into law before the May 2 deadline.
“There would be no excuse to deny [the Kenyan] team from participation in the Rio de Janeiro Olympics in August,” said Kenyatta.
On April 22, Kenyatta signed the bill, which criminalized doping in Kenya. Kenyans were reassured that they would watch their heroes strive for Olympic glory once again.
Back in Kenya, athletes continued to train for the Games. In late April, the Kenya Defence Forces (KDF) Athletics Championships took place on the outskirts of Nairobi. Winners would represent the KDF team, which would participate in the National Athletics Championships in July. This is where the Olympic fate of Kenya’s best athletes is decided.
Kenyan athletes also continued to excel internationally in the build-up to August. Scooping top spots in both the women’s and men’s races at the London Marathon, where Eliud Kipchoge beat the course record, Kenya’s athletes showed the world that they were able to remain focused despite the controversy.
More controversy was to come though. In May, Athletics Kenya announced the marathon squad to participate in the Olympics. The current holder of the marathon world record, Dennis Kimetto, wasn’t selected, sparking furious debate as sports enthusiasts put the doping controversy aside. Less than 72 hours later however, WADA would divert attention with the following statement: “The WADA CRC has made the unanimous recommendation that Kenya be declared non-compliant with immediate effect.” It claimed there were “inconsistencies” with the Kenyan legislation.
The news was a huge blow to the country, which believed it was on track for Rio.
“How is this happening? …I’m shocked,” said Keino, the former Olympic hero and Chairman of the National Olympics Committee of Kenya (Nock).
The rest of Kenya was just as flabbergasted. Many took to social media to express their disbelief and disappointment, including World Champion javelin thrower Julius Yego, who is an avid social media user (Yego learned how to throw the javelin by watching YouTube videos).
“It’s worrying and painful to remember the sacrifice, perseverance, dedication put towards achieving the success and ultimate goal and suddenly get [it taken away from] you! It’s heartbreaking and saddening!!” (sic),” said a perturbed Yego, who had been regularly updating his supporters through his Facebook page.
Yego’s words personalized a debate that had raged around the world for months. A blanket ban for Kenya would be disastrous for the country, but it would be devastating for the Kenyan athletes who were genuinely training hard to fulfil their Olympic ambitions come August 2016. Perhaps for the first time, Kenya started to envision an Olympics without its proud athletes participating.
Shocked into action, a couple of days later, a Kenyan delegation, with Cabinet Secretary for Foreign Affairs, Amina Mohamed, and Cabinet Secretary for Sports, Hassan Wario, flew to Montreal, Canada, to meet Wada officials. Here Kenya agreed to a roadmap allowing the country to become fully compliant with Wada’s code after making amendments to the Anti-Doping Act. In addition to this, reports flooded in that while WADA had deemed Kenya non-compliant, the power to ban the country from Rio ultimately lay with the International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF), which said that Kenya was eligible to participate in Rio, unless the International Olympic Committee (IOC) said otherwise. A collective sigh of relief could be heard in Kenya.
For now it appears that Kenya is in the clear, and while it is very evident that the issue of doping is a complex challenge that Kenya must urgently deal with, one can only wonder how prepared Kenyan athletes are. They need to put the drama behind them and represent their country at the Olympics with as much conviction as ever.

Heroes Almost Heartbroken

Runners Kipchoge Keino and Pamela Jelimo are divided by age, but united by the fact that they are both Olympic champions. The contrast in their Olympic lives tells the story of half a century of change for African athletes.
Keino—known as “Kip”—ran when athletics was an amateur sport. Jelimo burst onto the scene as a professional athlete. For her, the Olympic medal meant ‘increased personal brand value’—as the marketing men say these days.
Kip, 72, a two-time Olympic gold medallist, is chairman of the National Olympic Committee of Kenya (NOCK). He has kept his lean, athletic, whipcord frame that propelled him down the track to glory in Mexico.
Kip won the 1,500 meters gold in the 1968 Olympics in Mexico City, amid the energy-sapping, thin air caused by the altitude, on a day he defied the doctors, who recommended that he pull out. Legend has it that Kip was stuck in Mexico City’s notorious traffic before the race and had to run a mile to the stadium to make the starting line-up in time. In the race, Kip beat United States track star Jim Ryun by more than 20 meters—a record, before going on to win the silver in the 5,000 meters. He was just 23.
<div id="attachment_816" style="width: 210px" class="wp-caption alignleft"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-816" class="wp-image-816 size-medium" src="/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/50438922_10-200x300.jpg" alt="" width="200" height="300" />Kenyan track star Kipchoge Keino (L) finishing ahead of teammate Ben Jipcho (574) in the 3,000-meter steeplechase final at the Summer Olympics. (Photo by John Dominis//Time Life Pictures/Getty Images)</div>
Four years later, in the 1972 Olympics in Germany, he won gold in the 3,000 meters steeplechase and silver in the 1,500 meters.
“To be an Olympic champion takes a lot of dedication from an individual,” he says.
“The Olympic gold was for you, the country and the continent of Africa. There were very few athletes from Africa in those days and it is not like what you have today.”
Kip says his biggest problem was getting time off from work.
“Sometimes being on duty meant missing meals and then you had to go train, even without a meal. There was nothing like nutrition,” he says.
“During our time we had no coaches. It was up to you to personally work on your skills in your own free time. We were not allowed to go out for more than 28 days a year because of a rule put in place by the International Association of Athletics Federations. In those days, we had amateur status, not like today.”
Kip was a police officer from the late 1960s, rising through the ranks to become chief inspector. He retired from athletics in 1973.
Jelimo embodies the renaissance of Kenyan women in athletics: for the first time, they have better prospects of bringing home gold than the men.
Jelimo, 22, the reigning 800 meters Olympic champion, is also a police officer. But unlike in Kip’s day, there are more flexible working hours to allow for international athletics events.
Also unlike Kip, Jelimo has a number of trainers—including Bryan Engelherdt and other runners like Daniel Sirima—to help her prepare. She is expected to be one of the hotshots at the London Olympics as she runs for a second gold in the 800 meters.
It hasn’t been easy. Jelimo may have gone back to winning ways this year, clinching gold at the World Indoor Championships in Turkey in March, but injury, namely a strained Achilles tendon, has been her biggest opponent.
“I have suffered for three years because of many injuries, but I pray that I will continue working hard and keep the spirit burning, so that by the end of June, I will be in my best competitive form.”
<div id="attachment_817" style="width: 484px" class="wp-caption alignleft"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-817" class="size-large wp-image-817" src="/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/Forbes.Africa-Dr.Keino-12cm8cm@300dpi-1024x683.jpg" alt="" width="474" height="316" />Kip Keino</div>
The Olympics is her main objective. “I know that I am the defending champion, but the main objective will be to run under two minutes in the Kenyan qualifying rounds to make it to the Olympics.”
Jelimo, then 18, won gold at the Beijing Olympics in 2000, which was the icing on the cake for a very successful year. She became the first Kenyan to win the $1 million Golden League Jackpot that very year. Those earnings were a just reward for the years of toil in which her parents struggled to put her through school.
“Athletics is like a cake and everybody wants to have a piece of it.  Sports is very rewarding and people should take it seriously [if they have the] talent,” she says.
Kip was actually one of the athletes at the forefront of making the sport professional. “We were not being paid for running. So the year after the Munich Olympics, we decided to form an International Track Association (ITA), where the athletes would run in field events and make money. The athletes would be paid like in other sport such as tennis. The IAAF [International Association of Athletics Federation] realised that ITA would overtake them and so IAAF also started paying athletes the money.”
The prize money has made athletics more lucrative as a sport and as Jelimo works her way back from injury, she acknowledges the increasing competition in the sport.
“It is hard coming back, after being out, to compete with people who have been training for three months. You cannot take a race and say it is simple. There is no race which is that simple,” she says.
Some of her main challengers for the Olympic gold are fellow Kenyan runner Janeth Jepkosgei and the South African, Caster Semenya.
“I don’t fear anybody when I am in the field. When I am in shape, I am in shape because you know everybody is fighting for it and you should be fighting for it. It is all mental,” she says.
Kip says there is rising competition and that victory is hard these days.
“Well, for Kenyans it can be natural, but what about the other people in the world? They can also be nurtured to compete. Anybody in the world can do anything with the talent God has given them,” he says. “There is nothing special about Kenyan athletes. The only thing that is special is their training. They prepare themselves physically and mentally.”

Tag: Kipchoge Keino

FORBES AFRICA SOCIAL MEDIA

Heroes Almost Heartbroken

A Tale Of Two Runners