- The Kenya relay team for the Olympic Games in Paris France had to wait until last minute to secure their slot
- However despite their last minute qualification, they are determined to leave a mark at the games and are ready to challenge mixed relay giants in the world of athletics
Image: TEDDY MULEI
The Kenya relay team for the Olympic Games in Paris France had to wait until the last minute to secure their slot through rankings.
The team failed to earn a direct qualification in the Bahamas during the world relay championship but managed to go through world rankings.
The team comprises Mercy Chebet, Boniface Mweresa who will be making his second Olympic games, Maureen Thomas, Veronica Mutua, David Sanayek, Tauta Sane and Kelvin Kipkorir.
Despite their last-minute qualification, they are determined to leave a mark at the games and are ready to challenge mixed relay giants in the world of athletics.
The mixed relay sport was first introduced in Word athletics in the 2017 World Athletics championship and comprised of two female and two male members
. Experienced sprinter Boniface is one of the key runners in the team. He says their training is almost at 90% with one week to go before the games.
"We are almost home, we've had good training so far, in terms of qualification i can say we really had good faith and our patience was high, however, it was hard for us waiting for confirmation, but i thank the likes of Mary Moraa for pushing us to the end and the wait was worth it," he said.
When it comes to relay, the likes fo Botswana in Africa are still ahead of Kenya in terms of timings but Mweresa says they can still match their pace.
Mweresa says to beat the likes of Botswana and South Africa who are more experienced in the race, you might need to run a split of 44 seconds something he admits can be achieved.
"The only strategy is to get guys to run fast. We have guys who can do a 44 in splits and that's the only way we can beat the likes of Botswana, we have a good team," he added.
Mixed relay involves lots of tactics especially when it comes to starting and anchoring and everything boils down to how you plan your tactics.
In most cases, men start the race with ladies taking over and then passing over to men and finally ladies anchoring.
This is mostly based on decisions from world athletics.
However, Mweresa says everything is planned by the coaches and they get to start who starts with coaches mostly looking at those who can split very fast.
One of the challenges in relays is button exchange which has in the past cost many teams including powerhouses like USA.
Mweresa says this is one of the things are keenly working on it to make sure everything is perfect.
He says they do button training most of the time after training.
"Our weakness now is the handling, basically the acceleration towards the takeover overs, receiving the button we are OK, but now the acceleration part and that's where our opponents get chance to open the gap. So we are really working to make sure we don't end up chasing those guys," Mweresa said.
Another member of the team Maureen Thomas who will be making her debut in the games says she is excited by the prospect of representing Team Kenya in the games.
Just like Mweresa, Maureen says she's been impressed by their training so far.