Updated: Mary Moraa won’t be running in the women’s 400m event
Table of Contents
As three Kenyan sprinters prepare to compete at the 2024 Paris Olympic Games, which begin later this month, any medal they win will be a significant achievement in the country’s history of running in the sprints.
Of the 113 Olympic medals Kenya has ever won at the Games -35 Gold, 42 Silver and 36 Bronze, only five of the medals, one being a gold medal, have come from the sprint events.
Kenyan Sprinters at the past Olympics
After a 14-year break, Kenya’s latest sprint win was Boniface Tumuti’s silver medal in the men’s 400m hurdles at the 2016 Rio Olympic Games.
The first sprint medal to Kenya came in 1968 at the Mexico Games, in the men’s 4x400m relays, where the team of Daniel Rudisha, Munyoro Nyamau, Naftali Bon, and Charles Asati won a silver medal. Asati and Nyamau would go on to win the first gold medal in the same event at the 1972 Games in Munich after teaming up with Julius Sang and Robert Ouko. Sang also won an individual bronze medal in the men’s 400m that year.
It took 20 years before Kenya won another sprint medal through Samson Kitur, who won another bronze medal in the 400m at the 1992 Barcelona Games.
The sprinters representing Kenya at the Paris Games
One of the Kenyan sprint stars to watch out for in the “city of love” will be Ferdinand Omanyala, the fastest man in Africa so far with a personal best time of 9.77 in the men’s 100m event. Until this past weekend, Omanyala held the world-leading time of 9.79 before Kishane Thompson of Jamaica astonished the world with a time of 9.77 to win the Jamaican trials on Saturday.
The men’s 100m race in Paris will be hotly contested, with USA’s Noah Lyles and Kenneth Bednarek, Botswana’s Letsite Tebogo, Jamaica’s Oblique Seville and South Africa’s Akani Simbine being some of the big names to watch out for.
Any medal that comes to Omanyala will be Kenya’s first ever in the 100m event at the Olympic Games.
If Moraa had been entered, another historic medal would have been the women’s 400m, where Mary Moraa, “the dancing queen of 800m,” would have aimed to be the first female runner to win a sprint medal for Kenya at the Olympics. Moraa will compete only in the 800m at the Games, which has been confirmed after the entries were released earlier this week.
The other Kenyan sprint stars heading to Paris after getting the Olympic qualifying times are Wiseman Were Mukhobe in the men’s 400m Hurdles and Zablon Ekhal Ekwam in the men’s 400m.