Let’s support Team Kenya at the Rio Olympic Games

 

The second batch of Kenya’s Olympians leaves for Rio de Janeiro today to take part in the first Olympic Games to be hosted by Brazil from Friday. The various teams entered for the Olympics have had a pretty smooth training programme in residential camp, therefore competitors in various sporting disciplines should be quite focused in their endeavour to bring home medals. Special focus will be on athletics where Kenya has proved that it will be the nation to beat after finishing top in last year’s world athletics championships in Beijing.

The only blight to the team’s participation has been the doping allegations swirling around the athletics team and Kenya’s near ban from the Games for delaying to enact legislation that will provide direction about how doping cases are prosecuted. For a while, it had seemed that Kenya would be locked out of the Olympics after it was noted that although the country had enacted legislation which outlawed doping, some technical provisions of the Anti-Doping Act 2016 were inconsistent with the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) code. Because of these inconsistencies, WADA declared Kenya non-compliant and recommended that the country be withdrawn from the Olympics. Fortunately, the International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF) and International Olympic Committee (IOC) intervened and opted to grant Kenya a reprieve until end of the year.