World Athletics president Sebastian Coe recently visited Kenya and met President William Ruto at State House, Nairobi.
His tour came amid myriad doping problems sweeping across the athletics landscape. It was also barely few weeks after World Athletics Council gave a reprieve over spiraling cases of doping among Kenyan athletes.
Kenya is one of eight 'Category A' nations deemed by the Athletics Integrity Unit to have the highest doping risk, which threatens overall integrity of the sport. The others are Albania, Armenia, Georgia, Kyrgyzstan, Moldova, Turkey and Uzbekistan.
Coe lauded Kenya's efforts to fight the scourge including the government's move to increase funding to the war against doping to Sh619 million annually for five years.
Coe said the funding will increase number of tests and investigations besides bolstering the already comprehensive education programmes by Athletics Kenya and Anti-Doping Agency of Kenya.
In the last four years, 90 Kenyan athletes have been banned or suspended for varying doping offences with 30 cases coming last year. But the sport needs a refining if not an overhaul. So far, athletics faces huge challenges even as Athletics Kenya gears up to send teams to World Cross Country Championships in Australia next month and the World Athletics Championships in Budapest, Hungary, in July.
From poor infrastructure, doping, mysterious deaths among world beating athletes, chain of scandals within Sports Ministry and federations to Kenyan talents switching nationalities to other countries; the bottlenecks look too many.
With the new administration, we feel it is about time we unlock our athletics management from these challenges that have threatened to sully our image.
Last year, Kenyan athletes staged brilliant showing at the finale of the World Athletics Diamond League meeting in Zurich, Switzerland.
Five of them, two-time Olympic and world 1500m champion Faith Chepngetich, Olympic and world 800m champion Emmanuel Korir, Commonwealth Games 5000m silver medalist Nicholas Kimeli, world 5000m silver medalist Beatrice Chebet and Commonwealth Games 800m champion Mary Moraa, won the 2022 Diamond League Trophies, which earn them automatic slots at the World Athletics Championships in Budapest, Hungary, on August 19-27 next year. Quite an impressive feat.
We hope Athletics Kenya will build on these performances and prepare a formidable team for the World Championships and, perhaps, the Olympic Games in Paris, France, next year. AK should also prepare a roadmap for Kenya to reclaim our lost titles in men's 5000m and 10,000m as well as the 3,000m steeplechase, which we lost it after dominating for 53 years.
We are basking in a constellation of latent talents which we only need to stir. Let's take Coe's gesture as a stride before us!
