World champ Manangoi chase Club Games title

[PHOTO: COURTESY]

World champion Elijah Manangoi will lead Kenya’s charge for 1,500m glory with round one action at Carrara Stadium today.

Manangoi, 26, is out to make amends in the Club Games having taken the wooden spoon at the 2014 Commonwealth Games showdown in 2014.

By then, Manangoi was a rookie. But he will now lead world junior champion Kumari Taki and world silver medallist Timothy Cheruiyot.

But it’s interesting to note of Manangoi’s and Cheruiyot’s frantic struggle to ascend to the top.

For Manangoi, he switched from 400m to 1,500m and was named in the 2014 Commonwealth Games team where he did not do well. But he made amends at the 2015 World Championships in Beijing by winning silver behind Asbel Kiprop.

Cheruiyot’s athletics rise to stardom offers refreshing moments and a good show in Gold Coast will make it even better.

In 2014, he had never set foot at the Jomo Kenyatta International Airport and could only hear his peers talk about the excitement of travelling outside the country.

But the sheer agony of waiting for a dream-come-true dawned on him when Athletics Kenya gave him a call-up to the national team to the IAAF World Relay Championships in Nassau, Bahamas, that year.