AK to use past times to pick Nairobi tour team
Athletics Kenya will use results from last year’s trials for the 2019 African Games and World Athletics Championships to pick the team for the Kip Keino Classic slated for October 3.
“We shall also consider the results from our track and field meetings last year.
Athletes, who finished in the top three from these events should get top priority,” said Athletics Kenya’s senior vice-president Paul Mutwii.
The new development comes after Athletics Kenya called off the test run event that had been organised as a build up for local athletes ahead of the Nairobi Continental Tour which is one of the seven gold events in the World Athletics Continental series.
The test event was earlier scheduled to be held at the Nyayo stadium before it was postponed to September 19.
However, according to Mutwii the event was cancelled because renovations at the Nyayo National Stadium are not complete.
“We intended to push it to next week but we have been informed that the stadium will not be ready in time.
“We cannot move it to another stadium since we wanted to specifically assess the stadium in readiness for the Kip Keino Classic,” said Mutwii.
He stated that the number of the athletes who will take part in the event from a projected 230 to less than 100 owing to the government’s Covid-19 restrictions had been reduced.
Mutwii said one of the reasons AK will reduced the number of participants concerns propsals by the Ministry of Sports requiring athletes to be tested for Covid-19 before being put in camp for not less than three days.
“We shall use a minimum of Sh5,000 to test athletes. This is definitely an expensive affair considering that we must host them together for over 72 hours,” he said noted.
Being a World Athletics event, Mutwii said officials during the Kip Keino Classic must have been certified by the global body through relevant technical training procedures.
He added that World Athletics’ regional technical head, Kenya’s Ibrahim Hussein, will advise them on the way forward.
Core events during the Kip Keino Classic are triple jump, hammer throw, 200m and 3,000m steeplechase. The events will feature men and women.
Javelin (men only), 400m, 800m, 1,500m and 5,000m fall under the discretionary events.
The 20km race walk, high jump (men only), long jump (women only), 4x400m mixed relay, 400m hurdles and 10,000m (men only) are in the national category.
Kip Keino Classic is the sixth meeting of the inaugural Continental Gold Tour and the only leg to be held in Africa.
Among those selected last year to compete in the African Games were seasoned athletes like 2011 African Games javelin champion Julius Yego, who is also the 2015 World champion, 3,000m steeplechase world record holder Beatrice Chepkoech, the 2017 world cross country senior women silver medallist Lilian Kasait and the 2015 African Games 100m silver medallist Eunice Kadogo, who competed in 200m.
