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

Fresh from training in London, the approaching Olympics is just starting to feel real for Johny Akinyemi.
<div id="attachment_932" style="width: 484px" class="wp-caption alignleft"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-932" class="size-large wp-image-932" src="/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/143000275-1-1024x663.jpg" alt="" width="474" height="307" />Aerial view of the Olympic Stadium</div>
“After I qualified it was a bit of a dream, and then you have to quickly realize it’s not that long until the games. You have to get down and focus on the training and put in the hours and the hard work,” he says.
A British-born canoeist of Nigerian blood, Akinyemi, 23, has a realistic shot at a medal in London in the white water slalom, having beaten Beijing bronze medalist, Benjamin Boukpeti, in the qualifiers to book his place. Since then, he has put in the hard graft, training at altitude in South Africa and on courses in Cardiff and London. “Now I’m at quite a high level of training. I don’t want to peak too soon,” he says.
Raised in Warrington, near Manchester in England, Akinyemi represented the British team at a junior level, and was for a time the country’s top youth canoeist before switching allegiance to Nigeria, narrowly missing out on a trip to China in 2008. Since then, he has worked hard to improve the profile and practice of the sport in West Africa. The Nigerian Canoe Federation was founded in 2007, attached to the country’s active rowing association, based on Victoria Island in Lagos, and Akinyemi has been there since the start, getting a crash course in the country’s infamous bureaucracy on the way.
“We got a container full of boats delivered to Nigeria—some sprint canoes and slalom kayaks. It took about 18 months to get them out of the port, but eventually we got them out,” he says.
It is unlikely that the sport is going to challenge Nigeria’s other sporting passions—soccer and wrestling—but it is generating a buzz in certain circles. The country picked up two canoeing medals in the All Africa Games, on top of Akinyemi’s own qualification for London 2012. Once the games are over, he will head to Nigeria’s Calabar region to scout out some white water to train on and to hopefully set up a club there to train the next generation of slalom competitors. Akinyemi believes that the potential is there for Nigeria to achieve.
“In Lagos, there are canoes everywhere. There are villages out on the water—canoes are a way of life for those guys. They’re not carbon kevlar, but I’m sure that if we could, in some way, get these guys in competitive canoeing they would be good at it. They’re used to the water, they’re used to using the paddle, and they’ve got the strength.”
The success and the interest has not, however, transmuted into riches for the sport or for Akinyemi himself, who is currently looking for a sponsor. Up until 2011, most of his funding came from his father, who paid for airfares and gear. The Nigerian Olympic Committee has paid for his canoe for the London games and is contributing to the fees for training on the Olympic course, which come to £60 ($93) per hour. The Olympic Solidarity Commission, which funds athletes from lower income countries, allocates him around $1,000 a month for training and equipment, which, given the cost of canoes and the requirement for international travel, is a drop in the river.
The dreamlike rush of excitement, followed by hard graft and tangles over sponsorship, of Akinyemi’s experience is, in microcosm, the London Olympics. Since winning the bid, the euphoria has dissipated amidst a mixture of traditional British cynicism and genuine economic pain. The 2009 recession was followed by a brief and uninspiring calm, before a combination of deep state spending cuts and the European sovereign debt crisis dragged the British economy back into the mire. The Olympic stadia are among the few buildings of scale still under construction in London, as funding dried up and the rationale vanished for new skyscrapers in a city where jobs were being lost.
Britain notoriously overspends and delivers late on its big projects: the Millennium Dome, £200 million ($362.3 million) over budget; the new Wembley stadium, a year too late; so it was hardly surprising that expectations were fairly low. The experience of the Dome also highlighted the difficulty of turning showcase projects into useful infrastructure.
The Olympics, more than any event, is known for its white elephants. Greece, which hosted the 2004 games, as if it hasn’t suffered enough this year, has the embarrassment of a number of crumbling and unused facilities. After spending more than €10 billion ($12.2 billion) on running the games, Greece now has the cost of the upkeep of these abandoned buildings.
On the flip side, both the Barcelona and Atlanta games, in 1992 and 1996, respectively, are seen as exemplars of how to handle legacy programs. Both benefited from smart investments in infrastructure and marketing. London hopes to follow their example, rather than that of Athens, but the signs are not encouraging. A deal to sell the Olympic stadium to West Ham football club fell through in October 2011 and the Olympic Park Legacy Committee is now on the hunt for tenants.
The rest of the site in East London will be renamed the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park, with the sports facilities opened up to the public and the athletes’ village turned into housing. Just how much demand there will be for a high tech velodrome in Stratford, one of the capital’s more deprived areas, remains to be seen.
One part of the organization does seem to be running smoothly: Sponsorship, branding and broadcast rights are expected to generate around £2 billion ($3 billion) for the International Olympic Committee and the London organizers, and commentators have remarked on how visible the corporate presence is in the 2012 event.
The 70,000 volunteer “Games Makers” will have their training materials prepared by McDonald’s, which will be operating the world’s largest fast food outlet in the Olympic village for the duration of the games. The US chain is one of 11 worldwide “Olympic Partners”—a group which also includes Samsung, Coca-Cola, Procter and Gamble and, controversially, Dow Chemical.
Dow’s contribution, which includes a “wrap” for the Olympic stadium, caused uproar amongst human rights groups, including Amnesty International. Dow acquired Union Carbide, the company responsible for the 1984 Bhopal disaster in India. Fears that the Indian team would boycott the opening ceremony, or even the entire Olympics, proved unfounded, but the issue has left a sour taste.
The commercialization of the games—the organizers insist that private sponsorship is what makes them possible—has also been a story. The aggressive clampdown on the use of trademarks, including the words “London 2012” have made headlines as small businesses in East London are warned that they could find themselves in serious trouble should they try to associate themselves with the event. The policing of this skirted close to farce at times, with reports that monitors from Locog—the London Organizing Committee of the Olympic Games—have arrived on set at photo shoots to prevent non-sponsors from recreating famous sporting moments or straying too close to the games. An East London florist was threatened with legal action unless she took down a display showing the famous rings made from flowers. Athletes who tweet endorsements for the “wrong” brand have been told they face expulsion. Others have sneered at the spectacle of the supposedly solemn ceremony of the torch relay being led by the Coca-Cola “Move to the Beat” bus blaring out pop music.
In working class East London, there is a sense that the London Olympics is a show more for the brands than for the people. There is also the question of whether the city can accommodate the extra 325,000 people per day using the transport system; the ire caused by the “games lanes” set aside to allow officials to bypass the inevitable gridlock; the near-indecipherable logo; the oddly phallic mascots, Wenlock and Mandeville; the £500 million ($768.5 million)—plus security operation that has seen anti-aircraft missiles stationed on rooftops in Tower Hamlets and warships in the Thames.
Even so, the excitement is building, albeit not as fast as the organizers might have hoped. The torch relay—headed of course by the sponsors’ buses—flickered in the public imagination before a long-awaited spell of hot weather hit the country and the British public moved en masse away from their television sets and into the sunshine. There was first the Queen’s Jubilee weekend to get out of the way, and then the European football championships, which usually puts the country into a disappointed mood. With these out of the way, the criticisms and introspection could either crescendo ahead of the opening ceremony on July 27, or disappear beneath the kind of pressured, euphoric patriotism the East End is famous for. For competitors like Akinyemi, however, it is unlikely to matter—he has canoes and the pride of Nigeria on his mind.

Tag: Medals

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Heroes Almost Heartbroken

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