The world has been running on Kenyan legs and in 2029 it comes home to pay

USA's Cambrea Sturgis and Olympic champion Gabrielle Thomas compete in the 200m women's event during the sixth edition of the Kip Keino Classic Continental Tour Gold at the Nyayo National Stadium in Nairobi. [AFP]

Nairobi's win in Budapest is not a trophy for the sports ministry. It is the first time this country gets to own the business it invented.

A man in Iten has spent 30 years building the careers of world champions, and has never once sat in a stadium where one of them was crowned. He knows the names of hills the rest of us have never heard of. He knows, to the second, what a runner should be doing on a wet Thursday morning in February to be ready for a final in August.

He has watched his athletes fly to Berlin, Doha, Eugene and Tokyo, and he has watched them win there on a neighbour's television with the sound turned up because his own set gave up years ago.

In August 2029 that man can board a matatu, pay a few hundred shillings, and be at the World Athletics Championships by evening.

That is what happened in Budapest on Tuesday afternoon, at the 242nd meeting of the World Athletics Council, when they read out the name Nairobi and ended 46 years of a very strange arrangement. Since the first championships in Helsinki in 1983, Kenya has supplied this sport with its heroes and almost nothing else.

We provided the legs. Europe, America and Asia provided the stadium, the tickets, the hotels, the broadcast trucks, the sponsors and the invoices. We won the races. Somebody else banked the weekend.

Kenya's Peres Jepchirchir celebrates after winning the Women's Marathon at the World Athletics Championships in Tokyo, on September 14, 2025.[AFP]

Nairobi was one of four cities in that race; the others were London, Rome and Munich. London had the 2012 Olympic stadium sitting in Stratford and public money already promised. Rome has been staging athletics since before half the federations in that room existed. Munich had the Olympiastadion and a national reputation for handing projects over early, and it still finished behind us and settled for 2031. Nothing about Tuesday was charity. Kenya walked into a room full of favourites and walked out with what they all wanted.

Most countries ask what they will receive before they commit anything. We committed first and asked afterwards. That is not naivety. In a bidding process, that is nerve.

Now to the part that should interest people who have never run a lap in their lives, and who are entitled to ask what a sports championship has to do with the price of unga.

The state has already put roughly 78 million dollars on the table, north of ten billion shillings, before a single ticket is printed. That figure will not disappear into a hole in the ground at Kasarani. It travels. It goes to contractors and quantity surveyors; to the electricians rewiring floodlights and the technicians pulling broadcast cable through conduit; to road works along Thika Road; to medical and security infrastructure that will still be standing in 2045.

Then the visitors land, and the sums get serious. Around two thousand athletes will come, and none of them travels alone. Each brings some combination of coach, doctor, physiotherapist and agent. Behind them come the journalists, several thousand of them, plus officials from more than two hundred federations, the sponsors, the rights holders and the various dignitaries who attend everything.

Then the ordinary fans, tens of thousands of them, most of whom will book a week in the Mara or on the coast on either side of the athletics, because very few people fly nine hours to Kenya and go home having seen only a running track.

Kenya's Ferdinand Omanyala after competing in the 100m heats during the World Athletics Championships 2025 at the National Stadium in Tokyo. [AFP]

Each of them needs a bed, a meal, a driver, a data bundle, and a return flight. Kenya Airways fills seats. Hotels in Westlands, Karen and Gigiri run December rates in August. Taxi drivers, tour operators, caterers, printers, riggers, security firms, translators, sign makers and the woman roasting maize outside Gate C all take a cut. Count it honestly, and the injection into this economy runs into billions of shillings, landing in hands that rarely come near that kind of money.

And there is a second windfall that almost nobody has mentioned, which may in the long run be worth more than the first.

Kasarani sits at about 1,600m above sea level. No senior World Championships have ever been staged that high, which means not one serious federation on earth will fly in three days before the opening ceremony. They will come weeks early to acclimatise, and they will not do it in a city hotel with a treadmill in the basement. They will go to Iten. To Kaptagat, Eldoret, Nyahururu, Kericho.

Consider what that means for towns that have spent three decades hosting a single foreign marathoner at a time, feeding him ugali and letting him tag onto the Thursday morning run. In 2029 they will host entire national teams with federation budgets attached. Guesthouses, camp managers, cooks, drivers, laundries, masseurs, local suppliers. The Rift Valley has been giving away the finest altitude training knowledge on the planet free of charge for fifty years. It's time it sent an invoice.

The altitude will shape the racing too, and it will shape it in our favour in a way the purists have not yet grasped. Thinner air rewards the sprinters and the horizontal jumpers, so expect a 100m final at Kasarani that people are still discussing in 2050, and expect Ferdinand Omanyala to run the race of his life in front of a crowd that has waited years to give him one.

The distance races will be different, and different in our favour. At 1,600m the winning times will be slow, and every athlete in the field knows it before the gun, so nobody will waste an evening pretending otherwise. What is left once the clock stops mattering is a group of runners watching one another lap after lap, waiting to see who goes first and whether he has anything left when he does.

That is the race Kenyans have been winning on European tracks for two generations, usually in front of crowds who spent the night squinting at the timing screen and only looked up over the final two hundred metres.

At Kasarani nobody will be waiting for a record. They will be standing from the gun, and anybody who was at the World Under-20 Championships in 2021 knows exactly what that stadium does when it is full.

The logistics are further along than the sceptics assume. Kasarani is already being rebuilt for the 2027 Africa Cup of Nations, which Kenya co-hosts with Uganda and Tanzania, taking the venue from around 48,000 seats towards 60,000 with a canopy and a reconstructed warm-up area.

Nyayo will handle training, and Talanta Sports City will expand what we can offer visiting teams. The useful consequence is that we do not start work on 2029 in 2029. We start in 2027, when a continental football tournament puts the roads, the hotels, the accreditation desks, the security plan and several thousand volunteers under real strain while there is still time to fix whatever breaks.

Other hosts would pay a premium for a trial run. Ours arrived by accident and we ought to use it. In any case, we are hardly beginners. Mombasa put on the World Cross Country Championships in 2007, Nairobi ran the World Under-18 in 2017 and then the World Under-20 in 2021, the second of those managed without fuss while the world was still closing airports. The Kip Keino Classic has carried Gold Label status for years now. Nobody here is learning the job. We are being moved up a grade.

One more detail fixes 2029 permanently in the sport's history. The marathon is moving to its own standalone championships from 2030, with Athens lined up for the inaugural edition, which makes Nairobi the last World Athletics Championships ever to carry a marathon in its programme. A championship marathon, run on Kenyan roads, closing a tradition that opened in Helsinki in 1983. No writer would dare submit that ending. It wrote itself.

By the time the flags come down, we will have officials who have run a world event and know where the trouble hides, volunteers who can move 50 thousand people through a turnstile twice a day without a crush, ticketing and accreditation that work on the morning they are needed, Kenyan camera operators who have cut a live feed watched in a hundred countries, and production houses that have delivered to that standard and can now price the job anywhere.

We will also have a few hundred thousand children who saw a world final from the terraces instead of on a cracked phone screen, and some of them will be on a starting line in 2037 because of it. Stadiums fall apart. None of that does. And for what it is worth, the next African city that bids will not have to spend its first meeting explaining that the continent can organise things, because we will have settled that in August 2029.

So picture the evening. August 2029, the light going orange over Thika Road, matatus backed up two kilometres to Roysambu, 60 thousand people inside and a green vest coming off the final water jump with one lap to run.

None of us has ever heard 60 thousand Kenyans watch a Kenyan win a world title on Kenyan ground. Not one of us. Not Kipchoge Keino, not David Rudisha, not Eliud Kipchoge, who, between them, have given this country more gold than most continents have managed, and every gram of it was won somewhere else, in front of somebody else's crowd, and carried home in a bag.

In August 2029, we finally hear it.