Test run for Kip Keino Classic

Athletics Kenya (AK) has picked 230 athletes for a test competition on September 12 ahead of the Kip Keino Classic scheduled for October 3 at the Nyayo National Stadium.

AK’s Director for Competitions Paul Mutwii told Nation Sport the participants for the event, the last of the World Athletics (WA) Continental Tour meetings, will be announced on Tuesday.

He said they selected the athletes based on their current world ranking by WA and athletes’ performance during the World Athletics Championships held in Doha last year.

“We realised that we will not have enough athletes who are ranked and that is why we used last year’s national championships and world championships trials to pick athletes in some events. We picked the ones who performed well,” Mutwii said.

He said that just like the test event, the Kip Keino Classic will purely be an invitational event  which will have straight finals.

Mutwii said the technical committee will use the test event to gauge their level of preparedness to host the Continental Tour. It will also be used to test selected athletes’ readiness for the event.  Runners who will not merit will be dropped from the list.

“We have to test our technical officials and the equipment, especially the electronic time machine. We also want to gauge the fitness of the athletes,” Mutwii said.

He said it will not be possible to have a new track laid at the Nyayo National Stadium. However, AK are banking on proper repairs to ensure the track is up to international standards starting from Monday.

“We have talked to Sports Kenya and we hope the local contractor will do a good job,” he said.

Mutwii also said that they are expecting to receive the protocols the Sports Cabinet Secretary Amina Mohamed will spell out before  the resumption of sporting activites in the face of the coronavirus  pandemic.

Mutwii said although AK plans to restrict the number of participants for the Kip Keino Classic to 15,000, the list of entries will depend of the CS’s report.

The core events during the Kip Keino Classic are triple jump, hammer throw, 200 metres and 3,000m steeplechase races featuring men and women.

Javelin throw (men only), 400m, 800m, 1,500m and 5,000m races will 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.

So far, three of the seven golden events in the Tour meets have been staged with the Seiko Golden Grand Prix that was held in Tokyo yesterday being the latest.

Seiko Golden Grand Prix was held at the Olympic Stadium that had been set to host the Olympic Games from July 24 to August 9 this year. The Games were postponed to next year owing to the  Covid-19 pandemic.

To help minimise risks of Covid-19, no spectators were present and the competitors were entirely made up of domestic athletes. But thousands of fans watched via TV and the live stream.

Local star Nozomi Tanaka, the world U-20 3000m champion, stepped down in distance to the 1500m and front-ran her way to a national record of four minutes and 05.27 seconds.