Kenya’s London-bound athletes must remain focused

For the next few days, Kenya will trend globally, for various reasons.

Of course, principally, our country will be in the news because of the eagerly anticipated August 8 General Election, which we pray comes and goes without incident.

Those angling for high political office, and their supporters — including those egocentric sycophants clinging onto these leaders’ coat-tails for selfish reasons — should remember that the country is bigger than all of us, and that elections come and go, but the country will remain.

Kenya will also trend for allegations of doping among the country’s elite athletes, a ritual that we often see surfacing, interestingly, on the eve of major championships.

On the eve of last year’s Rio Olympic Games, the western media was awash with claims of “widespread doping” among Kenyan athletes that one would even have visualised the athletes landing at Rio de Janeiro’s Galeao International Airport from Nairobi with carton-loads of syringes, ready to inject performance-enhancing substances into the bodies of our medal-winning runners.

The IAAF World Athletics Championships throw off in London this Friday and it’s hardly surprising that a German channel has unleashed another “expose” on “widespread use of banned substances among Kenya’s elite runners.” Yet another “whistle blower” has “spoken.”

Last year, Rosa Associati, one of the leading athlete management companies handling Kenyan runners, was accused of abetting in doping but were acquitted after charges pressed against them failed to succeed.

This week again, Rosa have been targeted by the German “expose-producing machine,” prompting a strong rebuttal from the Italy-based management company that was among the first to take in Kenyan professional runners.

In a statement issued from Italy on Monday, Rosa founder Gabrielle Rosa lamented that some athletes in his stable — past and present — were being paid by someone “trying to blackmail” the well heeled management company.

Gabrielle and Rosa Associati also took a swipe at journalists who rush to file “exposes” in a mad rush “without checking their veracity, only interested in getting a scoop.”

“After 27 years spent in helping Kenyan athletes and the country by every means, now we are attacked by crooks who discredit us, the whole Kenyan athletics world and all the great athletes that achieved outstanding results with us, such as Paul Tergat, Moses Tanui, Martin Lel, Margaret Okayo, Asbel Kiprop and hundreds of other runners,” Rosa said in his statement on Monday.

I feel Gabrielle’s pain.

He and director Federico Rosa endured agonizing court sessions last year and were given a clean bill of health, and it would be interesting to see if the latest claims against them hold any water.

While we agree that Kenyan athletics is not 100 per cent clean, and that the Anti-Doping Agency of Kenya (Adak) has a gargantuan task of catching cheats and cleaning up the system beyond reproach, we must also fiercely defend the clean athletes and managers who continuously come under unwarranted criticism from Pulitzer Award-seeking (or Hanns Joachim Friedrichs Award-seeking, to put it into context) journalists bereft of water-tight evidence to defend their claims.

Rosa Associati and Kenya’s London-bound athletes must not be distracted by the latest “expose” and only respond by running clean and winning clean. Many had expected the recent IAAF World Under-18 Championships in Nairobi, for instance, to be a major flop.

And when the closing ceremony concluded the action on July 16 without incident, it’s understandable that some foreign correspondents filing out of Nairobi are under pressure from their European headquarters to file that “earth shattering” expose on Kenyan athletics.

Such is the success of Kenyan athletics that it must be jealously guarded by way of clean athletes continuing to rake in the medals and Adak getting its footing and cleaning up the system without fear or favour.

And with the impasse over the selection of the 800 metres team done and dusted — with Diamond League winner Ferguson Rotich preferred over trials bronze medallist Michael Saruni — I wish Ferguson Rotich and all athletes travelling to England under the able head coach Joseph Kirwa all the best at the Olympic Stadium in Stratford from this Friday.

It won’t be easy to defend the overall title Kenya won at the last championships in Beijing, but your medals will help ease the tensions created by the spirited political campaigns ahead of the August 8 elections.

The medals will also silence the indefatigable keyboard ninjas from expose-hunting media houses of the west.