The unparalleled success of Kenya's junior girls in athletics

If there's anything as a sure thing in Kenyan Athletics then is is the success of junior girls in cross country.

 Theirs is a rich history of supremacy at that level. Tracing their performance from the early 90’s, our junior women have won the World Championships title twelve times, and recorded a perfect score twice. Despite the early promise, few have posted significant senior international results. It is surprising to see that since 1991, only three Kenyan girls who won junior world cross-country medals duplicated their feat at the senior level. 

During those years, Kenya's junior girls’ cross-country team won 28 world-championship medals. This contrasted to the senior level, which has double the medal opportunities, and won only 14.

One of the major stumbling blocks facing talented Kenyan junior female runners is a lack of continuity. Many of them excel in local and international championships but soon fizzle out, leaving athletics followers wondering why they cannot maintain their consistency at senior level.

Exactly what holds back so many girls is up for debate.  A number of factors have been cited, among them the maturity of girls’ to young women, the lack of professional guidance on diet and weight issues. There are also formidable cultural and social obstacles to be negotiated. Some get married at a young age and may consequently stop competing. Some undertake too many time-consuming obligations to train effectively while others fall victim to peer pressure.

Prize money, despite its potential for good, can also pose a problem as it can motivate girls to compete before they are quite ready and thus burn out. Unable to see past a new roof or an extra acre of land, some girls, and their families, focus on the present gains at the expense of their future athletic careers.

Worse still, this pursuit of the money sometimes causes girls to neglect their education. This is sad because if they get injured or pregnant, or simply lose interest in the sport, they have nothing to fall back on. It is impossible to know how many promising careers have been derailed by such problems as the situation is not discussed openly.

Amazingly, our young girls do not lack for good role models. For Lorna Kiplagat, Catherine Ndereba, Tegla Lorupe, Susan Sirma, Margaret Okayo and Vivian Cheruiyot have set standards for which the juniors can follow and look up to.

Despite Athletics Kenya having a budget to deal with youth development, they have done nothing to assist and develop our super youngsters. It has been left to pioneers like Lorna Kiplagat who  set up the first high altitude training camp for women in Africa. She has invested her prize money into alleviating the problems faced by girls looking for suitable residential camps and developing the next generation of female athletes. It is an investment that is beginning to pay off in ways likely to improve Kenyan society at large.

But we need to take it a step further from Lorna’s initiative if we are to continue to enjoy success at the junior level. A possible solution would be to start a sports academy, partnered with a major sponsor or sporting organization, for talented junior athletes where they combine academics and athletics. Students with exceptional running ability can be admitted on scholarship where they would get a solid education, but also get a chance to develop and focus on athletics with the best facilities and coaching that the country can provide. 

This way, our girls would be able to compete with and beat the Ethiopian women who, currently, are a standard above us. I’m sure Faith Chepngetich and Nancy Chepkemoi our two outstanding junior runners, can benefit from a project such as this and go on to be future World and Olympic champions.