There was something revealing about the immediate reaction to Nairobi being awarded the 2029 World Athletics Championships hosting rights.
Not the disappointment in London. That is perfectly legitimate.
London staged an excellent World Championships in 2017, had a substantial bid backed by about £45m (Shs237b) in public funding and had assembled a serious proposition.
The tone
It was the tone. The familiar vocabulary appeared quickly – snubbed, shock, heartbreak, failure.
One British newspaper went further, making Kenya’s doping record the central reason why World Athletics had supposedly made the wrong choice.
And elsewhere, Nairobi occasionally disappeared from the headlines. The story became ‘Africa’ getting the Championships.
That is profound. Nairobi did not beat London and Rome because Africa needed a consolation prize.
It beat both because, on this occasion, World Athletics decided that Nairobi presented the more compelling proposition.
The other European bidder, Munich, got the 2031 nod.
Sebastian Coe, hardly an outsider to British athletics, described Nairobi’s bid as ‘compelling and emotional’.
More importantly, World Athletics pointed to the substance behind it – strong operational planning, financial guarantees, a renovated Kasarani Stadium and Nairobi’s growing experience of hosting major international athletics.
The choice also completed a geographical sequence that is difficult to dismiss as some great injustice to Europe.
Beijing hosts in 2027, Nairobi in 2029 and Munich in 2031. Asia, Africa, Europe. Three continents, three editions.
That is not the death of European athletics. It is what an international federation looks like when it remembers the word ‘international’.
And perhaps that is the uncomfortable part of this conversation.
The world is considerably larger than Europe and the United States.
Kenya, of all countries, should not need to explain why.
Kenya has the numbers
Athletics is not something Kenya has recently discovered in preparation for a bid.
It is part of the country’s sporting DNA. World Athletics itself describes Kenya as one of the great athletics nations, while its own fan research found that 68 per cent of Kenyans surveyed rated their interest in athletics as high, compared with a global average of 39 per cent.
Kenya was the most athletics-interested market surveyed.
Then there are the numbers. By the end of 2025, Kenya had won 182 World Championships medals – 72 of them gold – second only to the United States’ 469.
At the Olympics, Kenya had amassed 124 medals, 117 of them in athletics.
At the 2025 World Championships in Tokyo, Kenya won seven gold medals and 11 medals overall, finishing second on the medal table. Great Britain won five medals and no gold.
That is not an argument that Kenya is entitled to host because it wins medals.
Hosting requires considerably more than sporting excellence.
But sporting excellence matters. Especially when the sport in question is athletics.
For decades, Kenya and Ethiopia have supplied the world with some of its most extraordinary distance runners.
Kip Keino. Catherine Ndereba. Paul Tergat. David Rudisha. Eliud Kipchoge. Faith Kipyegon. Haile Gebrselassie. Kenenisa Bekele.
The names keep coming. And the championships kept going elsewhere.
There is something almost absurd about the world’s most consequential athletics competition repeatedly travelling to countries with perfectly legitimate hosting credentials while the regions producing such an extraordinary proportion of its champions remained spectators to the business of hosting.
Nairobi has earned the stage
Nairobi has already shown that it can handle the responsibility.
It hosted the World U18 Championships in 2017. It hosted the World U20 Championships in 2021.
The Kip Keino Classic has become an important meeting on the World Athletics Continental Tour Gold circuit.
And Kasarani is undergoing a major overhaul ahead of the 2027 Africa Cup of Nations.
World Athletics specifically cited Nairobi’s previous hosting experience, operational planning and infrastructure investment in assessing the successful bid.
This is not a city being handed a world championship and told to figure it out. It has been building towards this.
Indeed, Nairobi previously bid for the 2025 Championships, only for Tokyo to win.
The second attempt came with a stronger proposition and considerably more experience behind it.
Kipchoge understood the argument long before the vote. During the campaign, he put it rather beautifully.
‘Giving Kenya the chance is giving back to the sport.’
He went on to point to Kenya’s decades of medals, records and Diamond League success, arguing that the opportunity to host would be a gift to both Kenya and Africa.
Then came Haile Gebrselassie, the Ethiopian great whose sporting rivalry with Kenya never prevented him from recognising what this moment means beyond national borders.
‘When I congratulate the Kenyans, indirectly I congratulate ourselves and the Africans as well,’ he said after the announcement.
‘World Athletics Championship has come to African soil for the first time.’ Exactly.
Kenya’s doping problem is real. It should not be minimised, romanticised or waved away because Nairobi has won a hosting vote. The integrity of the sport must remain non-negotiable.
But it is also possible to acknowledge that problem without reducing an entire athletics nation to it.
World Athletics knows the issue exists. It also knows what Kenya has contributed to the sport, what its athletes have achieved, what its fans bring to athletics and what hosting can do for the development of the sport on the continent.
The organisation has explicitly pointed to Kenya’s sporting record, public passion for athletics and hosting experience in explaining the decision.
That is why the decision matters beyond a stadium in Kasarani.
Africa is not an alternative
For years, the global sports calendar has had an almost predictable centre of gravity.
Europe and North America have dominated the hosting conversation, with the rest of the world too often treated as an emerging alternative rather than an equal part of it.
Look at the Fifa World Cup. South Africa hosted in 2010, becoming the first African country to stage the tournament.
Russia followed in 2018 and Qatar in 2022. Each time, different controversies surrounded the choice, and some criticism was entirely legitimate.
But there was also a recurring undertone – that the event had somehow travelled beyond its natural home.
That idea needs retiring. Europe is not the world. Britain is not the world. America is not the world.
They are important parts of it. So are Nairobi, Addis Ababa, Johannesburg, Doha, Tokyo, Beijing, Mumbai and countless other cities that increasingly expect to be treated not as interesting alternatives, but as part of the main conversation.
And this is not an argument against London.
London will host major athletics again. Its stadiums, crowds, organisation and history will remain valuable to the sport.
British disappointment can coexist perfectly comfortably with African celebration.
What should not coexist comfortably is the assumption that when an African city wins a global sporting right over a European one, the first question must be what is wrong with the African choice.
Sometimes the more interesting question is what took so long.
Nairobi’s moment has arrived. The remarkable thing is not that Africa is finally hosting the World Championships.
It is that, given Kenya’s astonishing record in athletics, it took until 2029.
NAIROBI 2029 – THE ATHLETICS CASE
Kenya by the numbers
182
World Athletics Championships medals won by Kenya through 2025
72
Of those medals that are gold
469
World Championships medals won by the United States, the all-time leader
124
Kenya’s total Olympic medals through Paris 2024
117
Kenyan Olympic medals won in athletics – 94.4 per cent of its Olympic total
11
Kenya’s medals at the 2025 World Championships in Tokyo, including seven golds
2017
Nairobi hosts the World U18 Championships at Kasarani
2021
Nairobi hosts the World U20 Championships
2029
Nairobi becomes the first African city to host the World Athletics Championships